


Thus, Always.

by oneinspats



Series: coveting desperate things [4]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Dead People, M/M, Mushrooms, assassins being assassins, everything can be a poison, it's the dose that matters, tyrants being tyrants, very early days of established relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-10
Updated: 2018-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-25 22:41:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 51,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12045798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oneinspats/pseuds/oneinspats
Summary: After no more a desolate thing Downey and Vetinari are muddling through. Unfortunate segues into the past which runs parallel to the present. Families are a sticky business, always. Oh, and there's been a death.[You do not have to read 'no more...' to read this.]





	1. Chapter 1

History is a cyclic poem written by time upon our memories. Take assassination as key example. There was the first assassination on the Disc. The details of it do not matter, only the fact that it  _ happened.  _ All assassinations after all are performances. They are theatered mimicry of the first. 

No assassination is singular.  _ Sic _ \- thus. When you assassinate you are surrounded by the ghosts of past and future.  _ Sic semper _ \- thus always. When you haul a man up in an office to bleed out, the cruelest death you have ever managed, you are not alone. There are millions of you standing there, millions of others who have done the same. There is a community in assassination.  _ Sic semper tyrannis _ \- thus always to tyrants.

The patrician is dead. Long live the patrician.

/

  
What does a patrician see when he looks in the mirror? Kings see themselves and through themselves they see their parents, grandparents. They are not alone while simultaneously they are completely alone.  

Patricians are just alone. They cannot afford to look in mirrors. 

/

Downey discovers mushrooms while others covet lilac. They do this with the fervour of the posthumous. They wish to say they were there. They look forward and see the flicker of illusory grandchildren who ask, Where were you during that May?

Drunk.

Downey spends most of his last year of undergraduate work in various states of inebriation. He has convinced himself, with the surety of an eighteen year old, that he works better while drunk.

Currently, he inspects a jar of sprouting enoki. Spindly, pale bodies bursting forth from compost he collected a week before the latest disturbance that had people like Dog-botherer running about as if they somehow mattered.

Ludo says, ‘I’m amazed how hot the jar is.’

Downey, having moved on from the mushroom to the liquor tray, mixes leftover juice and soda water with leftover rum and whiskey. He says, ‘life’s hot. It’s how it goes. Don’t touch it, you’ll contaminate it.’

They are in a basement room of the guild. It’s dark which is neither here nor there for mushrooms Downey has found. More importantly for fungal growth is that the room can be temperature controlled and is as close to a contaminate free environment as Downey is going to get. 

‘I tried to grow fly agaric but a competing mold was introduced and ruined the log I was growing it on.’

In order to keep the temperature low, the preference for his current mushrooms, Downey allows only two candles to be lit. The effect is ghoulish. Considering he feels like death the lighting is fitting. He probably looks like death, as well. His skin is grimy and there’s a small remainder of paint itching beneath his chin from some prank pulled the night before.

‘Love you, William, but you are  _ such _ a weirdo. Anyway,’ Ludo yawns, ‘I never put you down for this sort of person.’

‘What sort of person is that?’

Ludo waves to the jars of mushrooms, the piles of notes, sketches, charts. Downey blinks at the scene, attempting to see it with fresh eyes. As someone like Ludo would see it which requires him to consider how Ludo sees him and he cannot fathom that.

‘I hadn’t really thought about it. I read a book on mushrooms over Hogswatch. Dad got it for me, I think he still thinks I’m going into trade. It was about exotic aphrodisiacs that rich old women like to buy.’

Ludo regards him with faint amusement. Downey dislikes the scrutiny and glowers over his drink. It’s too sweet, makes his headache worse. Everything makes his headache worse.

‘It always amazes me,’ the older boy sighs.

‘What?’

‘How little you actually think, William. Yet you somehow muddle through with flying colours. A mystery for the ages.’

‘I think!’

‘Sure. About mushrooms and whatever else is your latest fixation.’ 

‘I can diversify, Ludo.’ 

Ludo pats Downey’s cheek. ‘It doesn’t matter, you know, we’re not all meant to be prodigies.’

Downey feels his face blaze. He wishes he hadn’t had the drink as it makes him flush with greater ease and then Ludo will know he is embarrassed and that his blood is up and that’s embarrassing which just makes him angry. Unable to craft a retort Downey turns with great intent to his notes. 

Ludo sighs saying something that might have been an apology but Downey isn’t listening. He answers in monosyllables until Ludo excuses himself. Once the door shuts Downey feels ashamed but cannot bring himself to run after his friend.

/

Downey writes to his sister Magda. She is one of three and the only one he likes. It’s the eve of his graduation. He is eighteen and about to receive his bachelors in the science of inhumation. He laid out his clothes for the next day and thinks he will look very nice in the robes with his new collar and cuffs he bought on credit. 

Magda had written, ‘now that you are eighteen what is it that you want most in life?’

He wants to reply, ‘a beautiful home, lucious clothes, delicious liquor and a fantastic income’ but feels that it’s too mercenary and not what Magda is after. He struggles with pen nib then with words. In the end he settles on, ‘I want to make myself understood, and make myself known; I think I want someone to take me with them.’

  
/

At four, maybe five, Downey is in the front lot of his family’s home on Grace-Church beside his mother’s cabbages and turnips. He is wearing a large shift belonging to a sister and is filthy. Dirt beneath small fingernails, knees stained brown, the shift itself existing as a distant cousin of white.

This is his earliest memory.

Early memories are difficult to pin down because of childhood. The human mind doesn’t handle the construction of time well. 

Currently, it’s Hogswatch and the Patrician is attending the Guild Hogswatch Dinner. Over the fish course he says to Downey, ‘Memory works, Lord Downey, because we impose a narrative in order to create time.’ 

Downey replies, ‘We don’t create time, your lordship, we just name it. It’d be like saying we created a mountain range just because we decided to name them the Ramtops.’ 

After dinner Downey escapes out to the courtyard with a glass of mulled. He is desperate for a fag and to not feel like he’s overheating. 

Vetinari follows. They stand awkward until the Patrician inquires, ‘speaking of narratives, childhood is one that we create. I think it’s one of the more posthumously created experiences.’

Downey doesn’t know how to respond to that so doesn’t. With the Patrician he always feels like he’s a bit dim but then is never sure if it’s because he isn’t as smart as Vetinari or if it’s because Vetinari just spills out word salad. 

Smart people should be able to make themselves understandable. Downey has had many, many annoyed students inform of him of this during their Introduction to Ankh-Morpork Philosophy class.  

‘What’s your earliest memory?’ 

Downey blinks. Realizes the question is his to answer. Speaks about cabbages and his sister’s shift. 

After some thought he adds, ‘I used to help my grandma with crosswords. We’d eat melon and she’d read me the questions. Oh wait, no. I correct myself, my earliest memory is walking towards my grandpa while he was cleaning his pipe. It was winter. He was sitting out the back door on a small stool with a cap on.’ 

Vetinari asks how he knows this to be the earliest and Downey reples that his grandpa died when he had been no more than four.

And Downey’s grandmother?

Eighteen. He saw her last at Hogswatch, actually. She hand rolled a fag and was smoking it with his father in the counting room. ‘My mother made me go and thank her for my present.’

The courtyard is being dusted with snow and their cups of mulled wine steam in night air.

Vetinari hums that Downey’s parents must have been pleased when he was made a lord.

‘Oh yes, possibly. And for you? Otters,’ Downey guesses. ‘For your earliest.’

‘Otters? Oh, no, I was eight or nine when that happened.’

Downey traces that thread. When had he first heard the otter story? Memory is fickle, unreliable and circular. It curls in upon itself. A cycle.

The human mind  _ does _ like narratives so we enjoy finding metaphors in our past. Downey thinks: all important things happened to me either while I was holding someone as they puked their guts out (drunk friends, sick family members, ill students) or when I’m in the middle of something important.

It is an absurdly peaceful night. Like out of a book. There’s the Assassins’ Guild with its revelry. Some student made a rude snowman of the Commander in the courtyard. It has a very small cock. Bigger than the Guild is the city which is growing, expanding. It breaths in and out, a creature alive. Soon ground will vibrate with the Undertaking. The bank is starting to hold its own. The guilds pay taxes more often than not (well...for given values of “pay” and “taxes” and “often”). Due to increasing pressure from advocacy groups who make the Patrician’s life harder than he’d like it personhood rights are increasing. 

Everything is moving. Not always forward, but things do move.

Otters. 

Right, when did he first hear the otter story? Thirty years ago. Vetinari had been preparing to leave for a year off that turned into three. Downey had said, lounging in the doorway to Vetinari’s room, ‘Well this is unfair.’ Vetinari had then told him about the otters which hadn’t been nice but had been very Vetinari. Vetinari isn’t a nice person. 

Downey reasons that if Vetinari can forgive him for being so very Downey then he, Downey, can forgive the man for being so very Vetinari. Downey thinks, I guess I’m not very nice either if you want to get down to the nitty gritty. 

‘All right,’ Downey says. ‘What’s your earliest?’

‘Madam’s shoes. When I was very young I would walked about with them. I wouldn’t wear them, I would just carry them with me. I think I liked the colours.’

‘Better than trying to dig up the family turnips.’

The dusting snow grows heavier and their cups no longer keep fingers warm and so they return to the rowdy holiday spirits of the guild.   
  


/

  
May is the unofficial month of Remembrance. Lilac everywhere. Someone scrawls an angel on a public fountain and Vetinari has it scrubbed off. There are times for rising up. These are not them. 

Aside from May there is August. 

It was in an August seventeen years ago when Vetinari slipped from a noticeable, popular Klatchian restaurant into the Oblong office so quietly hardly anyone noticed

It was Tuesday August 13 when the city became restless. Stagnant, late summer humidity climbed up the walls like a cat in heat. Everyone had memorized the stench and sight of bloated, fly covered corpses of Snapcase’s latest former-enemies. Around their necks hung the old phrase ‘per lo stato.’ Wasps buried their young into the flesh of the dead, larva erupted from no longer bleeding wounds.

[This is public death in Ankh-Morpork: Crows attack eyes and tongue first. The soft, gentle parts of the face. June bugs, like wasps, make new growth out of old. Mushrooms burst forth from undisturbed chest cavities but more usually dogs and cats make short work of those left unburied. The decomposers of nature are left without much material to work with.]

On August 15 a man said, ‘the centre cannot hold. Things fall apart. The falcon cannot hear the falconer.’

His companion replied, ‘I can do Thursday. I’ve got a pathology class to prep for in the morning though.’

‘Downey, you clearly don’t appreciate theatrics.’

‘Sure, mine. But you’re not paying me to help with yours. Thursday night workable?’

‘And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards the city to be born?’

‘I’ll take that as a yes shall I?’

‘Yes, yes, Thursday evening is fine.’

Friday August 17 staff arrived and are informed that the rug in the Oblong Office can be removed and burnt. No amount of horse piss and blotting that can salvage it. Besides, the colour does not go with the room. Chartreuse rug? What a horrid thought.

Cleaning up after the dead has always been a grim task. Stains soaking through rug into hardwood made it particularly so. The floor must be stripped, re-stained, and re-waxed. Vetinari was tempted to replace the entirety of it but decided against it. He billed Downey for the clean up with no expectation of it being paid.

The rope, clothes, and body were taken care of alongside rug and floor. Everything was taken care of. Part of being an assassin is taking care of things. Having things sorted.

/

When forest fires sweep through the wilderness all manner of growth sprouts up after the detritus of the underbrush is scoured. Vetinari thinks it particularly fascinating what strange and fearsome things musters within charred remains of death.

When forests grow back, they often do not resemble what had existed there before.

 

/


	2. Chapter 2

Magda pushes through a slew of boys to get to her brother who is the worst of the lot. He is towards the centre of the guild’s courtyard hanging by the decorative, once-active, fountain. His bags are by his feet and he is lounging against another boy and she can tell by the sneering expression that he is drawling on about someone he dislikes.

‘Ah! Sister-mine,’ Downey chirps when he catches sight of her and waves. ‘Come to make sure I don’t get lost between here and home?’ He makes a face at the boy he had been using as a support. ‘She still thinks I’ve five even though I’m three and twenty now and have been for a solid four months.’

‘It’s a wonder,’ the boy remarks dryly. Magda grins.

‘I was going to be home later,’ Downey says. To which Magda says, ‘oh no, daddy wants you home now so you can help him.’ Her brother’s expression darkens and he mutters that she needn’t be so loud. She is always loud! Hasn’t she heard of not being loud? She snaps that he is the biggest loaf she’s ever known and she’s known a good many in her life.

Ignoring the sudden dirty feeling her skin has attained Magda throws her head back and says, ‘well come on. I haven’t got all day and me time isn’t free.’

‘My time.’

‘Get your bags, Will.’

Downey stiffly picks them up, mutters something to the lanky, older boy that sounds rude, and strides ahead of her so she is holding her skirts as she chases after him. He does not speak as they move through streets until they’re a good twenty minutes away from the guild when he spins on her.

‘It’s William,’ he snaps.

‘Don’t correct me in front of other people, Will.’

‘It hasn’t been Will since I was a boy.’

‘I’ll call you Will so long as you’re my kid brother.’  

‘And it’s ‘my time’ not ‘me time’ you weren’t born in a stable.’

Magda steps away from him and straightens her coat and adjusts her hat. She then daintily lifts her skirts and walks on without a word. She can hear Downey complaining behind her about how he didn’t mean it as an insult and he couldn’t help it. She doesn’t hear the word ‘sorry’ until they’re within sight of home and she knows he just wants to make quick amends before their mother sees them rowing.

‘Magda please-’

‘No.’

‘You haven’t been listening to me.’

‘And since when do you listen to _me_? Will.’

‘Magda,’ he drags the ‘a’ in her name out. ‘Come on.’ The ‘on’ is also dragged out. She sighs and turns towards him. He is holding his bags awkwardly and wearing a pleading look more sorrowful than their one-eared cat’s face when caught in rain.

Magda sighs and goes to him. Pulling him into an awkward hug where she does the hugging and he stands stiffly, bags still in hand, she says, ‘never mind it, Will. I know you’re just being a wee scag and it’s not personal.’

‘Thanks.’ Dry as dust.

She grins at him, pats his hair and says they had best get in before the neighbours gossip.

 

/

 

Downey sucks on the end of his pen and contemplates how to write a note to the patrician. Well, he amends, I’m not actually writing to the patrician so much as writing to Vetinari which is possibly worse.

‘I’m sorry we cannot have dinner tonight as planned due to unforeseen circumstances.’ It rings wrong. He discards the option.

‘Due to a sudden family matter I am unable to dine with you this evening.’

This is a little better only he has never spoken of his family beyond the occasional mention and Vetinari would be suspicious. He does not want Vetinari to be suspicious.

‘A sudden, and unforeseen family matter has made it so I cannot-’

Too much.

A sigh. He chucks a wad of paper across his office. It bounces off the ear of his dog, Alsace, who raises her shaggy head and looks woefully at Downey.

‘Sorry.’

She lets out a gentle woof and returns to sleep. Downey rests his chin on his hand and considers an outright lie. Perhaps a student in crisis? Something about politics at the guild? A last minute parent-teacher meeting about someone’s poor marks? Vetinari wouldn’t believe any of those excuses. No, no, he sighs, it must be the truth but the truth prompts questions and inquiries.

‘A sudden family matter has come up and so I am unable to make it to dinner tonight.’

What madness drove him to accept the patrician’s terribly worded and awkward proposal of ‘I think we should be more than colleagues?’ It has made everything far too complicated by half and he is 80% certain the Watch’s werewolf knows and that means, gods help us, Vimes probably knows which means Lady Sybil knows which means all the ladies who lunch know which means everyone and their grandmother in the gods-damned city knows which means this is all a mess and no, no, he breathes out. Most likely no one knows. Or only one or two. Three at most. Maybe four.

He should inhume them all.

Well. At least no one is dying. Well, no one of any importance to the city which leaves his family matter before him.

How do you speak to someone you have never been able to communicate to before? How do you do it as they die?

Downey knows death as intimately as anyone still alive can know death. He believes that only doctors and hospice workers know it better than he. This spectre of a dying father terrifies him.

In the end he writes, ‘I cannot come to dinner tonight. My father is dying.’

 

/

 

There is Magda, Laurie, William, and baby Sicily. Though Sicily is no longer a baby and quite capable of fending for herself at eighteen she will always be the wee one. The baby sister instead of kid sister. She barges through the house a storm on fire. Fearsome and raw.

‘It’s not fair we never get my favourite meal,’ she snaps. Magda pats her head which only makes matters worse. ‘Only Will’s.’

‘He’s gone for most of the year. And we eat your favourite on your birthday.’

‘But that hardly counts!’

Downey throws himself into a chair in the kitchen as their mother shoos the more useless Downey siblings out of her way.

‘Look at it this way Sis,’ he says, ‘I spend my birthday being dreary at the guild. You get yours here.’

‘Not much better,’ Sicily mutters.

Downey shrugs.

‘You’re the spoiled one,’ Sicily says.

Downey shrugs again.

‘So full of yourself.’

‘Hey,’ Magda turns around from the vegetables she is chopping. ‘Both of you behave. You’re not children.’

Downey points to his younger sister, ‘yes, Sicily, behave.’

Sicily sticks her tongue out and swishes from the room. Magda turns back to her chopping and their mother remains quiet over the stove. Occasionally she bends and shovels the logs this way and that as needed. A kettle is on one burner and boiling, a large pot on another.

Downey enjoys the warmth of the kitchen. It is his favourite room when home and not just because it is the warmest. There is foliage on the window, various herbs and flowers and succulents. The secret green thumb he only lets Ludo see is the one thing he inherited from her. In appearance he is all his father: oval face, dusty hair, dark eyes, thin lips, big smile, jaw line.

‘How was school?’ His mother asks. She has not turned around from the stove but he knows her face as sure as he knows the moon of Ankh-Morpork.

‘Good, fine. I’m in for grad-work.’

‘But I thought you just finished your masters.’

‘Yeah but I want a doctorate.’

She half turns, hand on her hip and her profile noble. Caught between firelight and shadow. ‘Why would you want that?’

‘Because.’

He cannot explain why he wants a doctorate. He just knows it is something that makes his skin itch. His bones feel terrible if he thinks about quitting now. And of course it wouldn’t be quitting. Many assassins live honourable and interesting lives with merely a Masters on top of their initial schooling. He had written to Magda all those years ago about wanting to understand himself. He has never quite managed that but thinks at three and twenty he has some time yet to figure that out. But the one thing he does know, as sure as humidity in summer and Ludo’s fancy inheritance, is that he wants those letters after his name. He wants to be William Downey, PhD. Dr. Downey. Dr. William Downey, Assassin. It is the sound of silk.

‘Your father won’t be mighty pleased. He expected you home years ago.’

‘I know.’

‘He expected you to come and learn the business once you graduated. He doesn’t understand why you need anything more.’

Downey shrugs.

‘You must explain your reasoning to him.’

Downey doesn’t think it will translate. You cannot explain a vague wanting of something to someone who makes everything a debit-credit column in his head.

Magda’s head is bowed over the cutting board. Downey wants to enlist her help. He wants to say, Explain this to Mum. Explain how this is something that is going to be bigger than dad’s business and our little lives here. Explain because I can’t because words and me don’t get on very well.

Instead he gets up and retreats to his room to read and write a confirmation letter to Dr. Tindel who will be overseeing his research. He wants to make sure that Dr. Tindel knows, that Dr. Tindel beyond a shadow of a doubt, is aware that Downey will be returning in the autumn.

Next, he writes to Jacob.

‘You are home as well and so am I and so this is a right mess. Don’t think we’re in for a beautiful summer as my parents expect me in the shop or counting room or down at the docks every day being a dutiful merchant son. I assume yours except you to be doing whatever it is quasi-lords do. Memorizing lineages. Do you still do that? Ludo can list his back two hundred years. Dog-botherer said that his goes back only to his father then all else are no-one’s which I hadn’t pinned on him being that he’s a right ass. How far back is your family? Pray it is more than DB’s but not as much as Ludo’s. One hundred years of nobility is enough. After that, ridiculous.

I am stuck here at home remembering how we met during history lecture and how I threw paper at you until you paid attention to me and how you were the more aware of the two of us and figured out what I meant by the paper chucking and now who am I going to bother?

Tell me everything you are doing. Tell me how you wake up. How you go about your day. How you spend evenings. How you sleep. Do you miss us? I miss us. Mostly, I miss the thrill. You said to be honest in all I write to you and so I shall be. I am sorry for leaving without saying goodbye but my sister was there and so therefore all bets were off. You are no one to me if my family is present just as I am no one to you when yours is around.

I am returning come September. I want more letters behind my name than you have. Will you be returning? It doesn’t matter in regards to us as we are because we can make it work regardless so long as I am not home. If I am home you are dead to me &tc.

I miss you. I have already written that but it is true. I think about your stupid face with its stupid freckles and your stupid nose and your stupid hair. Which is to say I miss you.’

  
  


It is in the middle of the night, after dinner and family games and the heavy quiet of his father when he goes to explain his future decisions in the counting room, that the letter is snuck out to the post. Downey thinks that there is a language for what he feels but he does not know it. What words exist for him and Jacob and this thing they have? Filthy words. He does not wish to apply them and really, they do not _mean_ him and Jacob. Those words mean _others_ . Not _them_. What they have is delightful. Others have dirty things worthy of condemnation. He and Jacob are not dirty, it is one of the few things Downey is certain of in the world at this point.

He spends the night on their neighbour’s roof smoking and watching the moon. He misses the freedom of the guild. He breathes out, watches the smoke dissipate in warm evening air. The sky is velvet and deep blue. Clouds ash grey, moon a pale slice.

Slipping back into the house he catches sight of an edge of a skirt disappearing around the corner towards the girls’ rooms. He stands in the darkened hall with the window half-ajar wondering if he should chase after and find which sister was spying on it. He thinks, Of course it’s Sicily. Laurie is too nice, Magda too mature. Sighing he locks the window and goes to bed.

 

/


	3. Chapter 3

Vetinari isn’t sure what to do with the note before him other than make a compilation of work he can do instead. Which he does. Transformative transportation systems do not make themselves. There are requests of services drafts to edit, white papers to read, procurement contracts to assess. The Undertaking is perhaps the most ambitious project in Ankh-Morpork’s history including the train. Train was easy. Explaining to people that you need to dig beneath their streets so you can transport people around in trains underground less so.

He has had all correspondences pertaining to the Undertaking collected and catalogued. So far well over half are people saying the prospect of the project should be canceled out right because they, whoever they are, do not like the idea of inconvenience.

Oh it will be loud. Oh there will be workmen in the street. Oh there will be ruffians around (there are fifteen letters to this effect, they are all from Lord Rust’s son). Oh it will disturb students who pay a lot of money to attend school here (Downey had explained in person, ‘I am not against it in principle, just maybe don’t build it during the school year?). Oh it will attract the wrong sort of people to my neighbourhood. Oh this oh that oh oh oh.

Vetinari thinks he should make an art piece out of them. He will title it ‘How To Impede Progress.’ Progress is not a guaranteed thing. History is not a line but a circle and only with great effort can you get it to spiral forward instead of back. There are young people in the city who act as if progress is granted, is only natural, is the Way Things Work. We always go forward. But they have grown up under him and stability and have never known a bad patrician. They have known an efficient and necessary man but not a cruel one.

He would hate to see their reactions to a cruel one.

August is a disgusting month to die in. It is hot and humid and the walls sweat, collars wilt by ten in the morning, and you cannot escape the smell of the city. Of perspiration and refuse and lives being lived.

Calling for Drumknott he asks for the files on the City Council.

William Downey, PhD. Master of the Assassin’s Guild. Age 53. Birthdate: May 12.

Vetinari flips through the fifteen years of accumulated documents on the man and finds an old outline of his family. There isn’t much to go by as merchant families don’t attract enough notice to make it worth recording names.

 

Father: Amos Downey

Mother: Annette Downey

Paternal Grandfather: Richard Downey

Paternal Grandmother: Laure Downey.

Sisters: Magda, Laure, Sicily.

 

If the address is up to date, which it most likely is, Vetinari thinks that August is an especially disgusting month to die in. There will be the smell of the tannery and Lion’s Head brewery with its yeasty effusions.

If Amos had children at the average age for the artisan and merchant class in the city that would mean the eldest would have been born when he was early to mid-twenties putting him currently in his mid to late-seventies.

Downey, to Vetinari’s astute recollections, has never mentioned his father. His mother, yes, his sisters with varying degrees of affection, yes, his grandparents even. Although it is unclear if they were paternal or maternal. Naturally, the archives only keep to one side. Vetinari thinks there is a good deal wrong with that and makes a note to have their methodology adjusted accordingly.

Never the father, the point remains.

Well, not everyone is close to all relatives.

He pulls out the note again and pens an appropriate reply with condolences and says they can reschedule for next week if that is convenient.

Downey writes back, ‘Thursday good?’

Vetinari smooths out the piece and thinks, Thursdays are always good.

 

/

 

Magda’s kitchen smells like hops. She is brewing and baking bread at the same time and her eldest daughter is sweating at the kitchen table.

‘Men shouldn’t be allowed in,’ the girl says. ‘You’re not yeasty enough.’ She then descends into church-bells of peals of laughter.

Magda turns around from the brew and says, ‘there’s small beer on the table.’

Downey seats himself opposite his niece who is grinning with big teeth and freckles.

‘How are you, Sam?’

Her shoulders go into a full-body droop. ‘I am unlovable.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘Gerald left me for Lily.’

‘That cad.’

‘Me! Uncle Will, _me._ ’

‘Scag.’

Magda, ‘language.’

‘She’s old enough.’

‘Can I hire you to inhume him, uncle?’

‘Yes.’ He pours himself a glass of beer. ‘But can I say something as an uncle not an assassin?’

‘No.’

‘I will anyway. From my experience, that is a decision you might come to regret. But I do offer a family rate for my favourites.’

‘How much?’

‘Create a portrait of the target for me.’

Magda turns full around with hands on her hips and she could be a spitting image of their mother. She then points at Downey with a wooden spoon, ‘I will not have you making my daughter guilty of murder-by-proxy.’

Downey puts his hands up, ‘I would never do such a thing.’

‘You are right now, sir. Right this instant.’

‘We were exchanging information. And inhumation isn’t murder; we’ve been over this.’

His sister does not heed. His sister has never heeded. This is a thirty-five year old argument. Sam hauls herself up from the table and declares that she is going to her room and she is not to be disturbed she she is going to _write._ She says as she leaves, ‘if I killed myself he’d be sorry.’

Downey says helpfully, ‘stones in pockets is a traditionally romantic way to self-murder. But you wouldn't be there to see his guilt.’

‘Oh I’d haunt him. I’d haunt the shit out of him.’

‘Good decision. Spite is a fantastic motivator.’

She departs and once her footsteps are securely upstairs Magda declares that she doesn’t know what she is going to do with that girl.

‘She seems like a fairly typical sixteen year old.’ Downey says.

‘All she does is sit in her room writing and reading. It’s not healthy. And she’s become so sneaky Will. I don’t know half of what goes on in her life.’

Downey finishes his glass of beer and explains that in his experience that is _exactly_ normal for a sixteen year old. Though his thirteen year olds are worse.

‘Everyone is trying to figure themselves out and won’t have it sorted till they’re five and twenty. Do you remember what we were like at that age? Absolute monsters. I wouldn’t want to meet myself as I was at that age mostly because I was obnoxious. It’s part of being a teenager. Sam’s being a writer or whatever at the moment. Give it six months and she’ll be something completely different.’

‘Do your students change so rapidly?’

‘On a daily basis, sister-mine.’

Adjusting everything on the stove so it can manage itself she joins Downey at the table. Resting her chin on her knuckles she motions to the pitcher of beer until Downey pours her a glass as well.

‘Are you going to visit him?’ She asks.

‘No.’

Magda nods. She disengages from her contemplative position to drink her beer.

‘You think I should,’ Downey says with a pointed look.

‘No.’

‘Yes you do. You want to give me a lecture about blood and water.’

‘Never.’

‘I’m not going to visit him.’

‘Fine.’

‘I distinctly dislike our family.’

‘You distinctly dislike most people, Will.’

‘I reserve an especially strong dislike for our family present company excluded. You visit him.’

‘I have.’

Downey motions as if to say, ‘there you go.’ Magda finishes her beer and covers the pitcher with a cheesecloth. Summer in Ankh-Morpork means fruit flies, winter means mice. The ever present battle surrounding food preservation is one she wishes she didn’t have to fight. You would think that having a lord for a brother would make life easier but if you thought that you would be acknowledging how little you know William Downey.

‘If you go I’ll go with you,’ Magda says.

‘Your presence has never made anything better between us. Anyway, I have to be off. His lordship has decided to hold city council meetings at the hottest point of the day.’

‘Why?’

‘Magda the day I understand how that man’s mind works is the day I achieve absolute enlightenment. Though mostly I think it’s a very dusty space to be.’

‘Enlightenment?’

‘His lordship’s head.’

 

/

 

See the problem with boys like Jacob de l’Enfer is that they say one thing like ‘When I go home this summer I can’t be seen with someone like you’ then act in a completely contrary manner.

Downey had agreed, Yes not seeing each other during the summer is wise. Best keep things on the down low. Best keep it away from all prying eyes. He had explained his family, even, to Jacob and he _never_ explains his family to anyone save Ludo but that’s only because Ludo hangs around a lot and is older and a bit smarter than Downey. (Only a bit, mind.)

And at the time Jacob had said, ‘oh of course, I understand. Yes, we will only send discreet letters at the very most and in code and take all precautions. That is the best for all involved. I understand.’

But now what? Now he’s writing and saying stupid things like, ‘I miss you’ and ‘I want to see you’ and ‘When can we meet up? We are going to meet up’ and Downey writes and writes about the whys and wherefores of how this is all impossible until they go back to the guild but Jacob doesn’t listen.

Eventually, Downey knows, he will give in.

It is easier that continuing to explain why they can’t. Jacob is a very insistent and resilient letter writer.

The amount of paper burned between the two of them is phenomenal.

But the giving in has yet to happen and so here he is, on rooftops, discreetly shuttling his letter over the city to Jacob’s house.

He resists the urge to creep and watch the family as they go about their late night business of sleeping and occasionally weeing. Instead he charts a circuitous way back home not wishing to return to his room and the sticky feeling that latches itself on to his skin as soon as he is in the house. The doctorate will keep him out of home for several years which is, at the end of the day, most of his motivation for pursuing it.

He knows he is no dog-botherer when it comes to intellect and he hates that. The jealousy eats him up and he wishes to be better than the other young man but can never manage it. Which is not to say that he isn’t good, quite the contrary, he is _very_ good. Only, he isn’t as good as dog-botherer.

Except at stealth, Downey did pass with a better grade than him in that but that’s only because the idiot failed to turn up for the exam and had to re-sit it.

Rounding a corner towards home movement in an alcove between shops catches his eye and he quickly sinks into the shadows. Stepping out for half a second from the indentation is Sicily and a young man who Downey recognizes as Robert Flint the son of a blacksmith. She glances around before tugging on Robert’s arm and they quickly cross the street to an alleyway where she turns with moon illuminated gleeful face and kisses her compatriot.

Ah, Downey thinks, I am not the only one sneaking off to where I shouldn’t be. The two dart further down the alley and are soon lost in the darkness. Slinking off towards home Downey rolls his eyes and thinks that Sicily couldn’t be more obvious in the street if she tried. He wonders if he should let their father know about this illicit affair but decides against it. Better to have it as potential blackmail than give away the golden goose.

Robert Flint is a blacksmith. Downeys do not marry blacksmiths. Downey women, most especially, do not carry on affairs outside of marriage with blacksmiths. Not when their father has Plans for them.

Back inside he tries to sleep but cannot for unknown reasons and so lurks in the kitchen until sunrise when he father comes down and ushers him off to quais-side then to his office.  

/

 

Downey takes the long way to the palace from his sister’s house and arrives at the same time as the commander of the city watch which means they have to walk along the hall to the Rat’s Chamber together.

Vimes becomes automatically uncomfortable but Downey is long used to people becoming automatically uncomfortable around him. The way the commander keeps a firm two foot distance between them and casts covert scowls says that he is going to get an earful once the council starts.

Downey considers which would be more painful for Vimes, talking to him or ignoring him. He lands on conversation. The man hates talking to him. Downey adopts a cheerful manner.

‘Hot day, commander.’

Vimes’ scowl deepens. ‘Yes.’

‘I hear crime increases with heat.’

‘Crime doesn’t care much for the weather.’

‘Come now, your grace.’ The anticipated twitch at ‘your grace’ happens and Downey’s cheeriness grows. ‘I read a piece on it in the _Times_. They even had an interview with you.’

‘Don’t believe everything you read.’

‘Wise words, I’m sure only that means I wouldn’t be believing you which puts a bit of a stickler on this. After you, your grace.’

Vimes takes his seat in the Rat’s Chamber with his customary lack of grace. Downey thinks that his grace should learn more grace to better fit his role. Why Vimes is allowed to be the second most powerful man in the city boggles the mind. He is crass and rude and flagrantly breaks all rules and customs. If one is going to break all rules and customs one should at least have class while doing so. And preferably one shouldn’t get caught.

Vetinari looks up from his papers as they arrive, the last of the group and glances a warning look at both of them. Downey scowls and thinks that he isn’t some child who needs to be told to behave in front of adults. He knows when to be a dick and when not too.

He thinks, Reminder for later, I’m not me when I was eighteen because if I was I’d've socked Vimes on sight and made rude gestures at dog-botherer by now.

The council members shuffle and settle for a moment before Vetinari begins. ‘The first item on the agenda has been the recent crime wave in the city.’

Vimes is resolutely not looking at Downey who smirks.

‘It has been brought to my attention that on top of the usual increase of illegal thefts that accompany the hotter months of the year there has been a rise in murder rate which won’t do. Commander Vimes, any news on that?’

‘We are working on it, my lord.’

‘Indeed. I am sure you are being diligent but I would appreciate a longer brief than what you tell the reporters of the Times.’

‘It’s the weather. People get a little mad when they’re unable to escape the heat then take it out on their mates at the pub. Over half of the incidents in the last month and a half are heat-of-the-moment incidents.’

Mr. Slant, head of the guild of Lawyers, says in his drifting manner, ‘the word you are looking for, commander, is manslaughter. Although I suppose we ought to change it to person-slaughter.’

‘Fine. They’re still dead and someone still did it though, which is all I’m concerned about. Murder is murder.’

‘Not legally.’

Vimes smiles too cheerfully, ‘I’m sure that’s of great consolation to the victims and their families.’

‘The law isn’t here for comfort.’

‘Justice should be.’

‘You miss the point, commander, of legal justice versus social justice.’

‘I fail to see why we should be separating them-’

‘Gentlemen,’ Vetinari holds up his hand. ‘As scintillating as this conversation is I beg you to remain on point.’

Vimes readjusts himself and turns back to Vetinari and delivers the remainder of his report which Downey thinks was strictly unnecessary. Beside him Slant sighs and murmurs something about all this new blood cluttering up the council table and Downey is not comfortable enough with such a pronunciation to comment. Slant sneers at him but returns his attention to Mr. Boggis of the Thieves Guild who is currently espousing the rigour with which he and his own handle illegal thieves.

‘We like to keep things short, simple and to the point.’

‘Usually by sticking them on a point,’ Vimes mutters soto voco.

‘We have taken care of four such cases this week,’ Mr. Boggis says with pride. ‘Your lordship can rest assured that we will soon have the matter sorted.’

Vetinari adjusts his papers as he says that he is sure all citizens of the city will rest easier knowing that they will only be legally robbed in the future.

The meeting ends with the usual fireworks between Rust and Vimes which Vetinari allows to continue until both men are through the chamber doors.

With languid motions Downey stands, gathers his hat and puts his coat back on. Vetinari is at the end of the table reading paperwork. Or pretending to read paperwork. Downey is never sure.

Downey loiters until the other lords and guild leaders have filed out and then says, ‘we’ve had an uptick in orders for your information.’

Vetinari looks up. ‘Have you? I had thought the bell was rather active.’

‘Three of them requested extreme discretion. I can only assume those were the three shoddily robbed and murdered cases mentioned in the Times article we all evidently read this morning.’

Vetinari nods and says he will make note of this.

Downey stands awkwardly at his chair. He wonders if he should apologize for missing the other night then decides not to because it does not warrant an apology.

‘Don’t let me detain you,’ Vetinari intones as he returns to the papers. As Downey reaches the chamber door Vetinari adds, ‘I trust you are well.’

‘Absolutely dandy.’

‘I am pleased to hear it.’

Downey knows Vetinari doesn’t believe him but he doesn’t care so long as the drated man doesn’t make it obvious. How do you respond to such a question? I trust you are well. He doesn’t know if he is well or not. He can’t place how he is feeling. It has been many years since he has been both present and outside of himself and he has always taken pride in his ability to handle all situations life throws his way. Not always with the grace and tact Vetinari has so naturally but handles all situations he does in his own fashion.

Vetinari had said, after he became Patrician, ‘that could have been more artfully done.’

And Downey had replied, ‘I don’t know what you mean. I helped you get rid of that atrocious rug.’

Downey lingers outside the guild before taking the back entrance into his office to avoid staff and students. It is as cool and pleasant as anywhere can be in August and Downey pours himself a drink before settling on the floor with his dogs. Alsace does her usual trick of burying her face beneath his leg while Harold sits very close and breaths in his face. Leaning back into legs of the armchair he scratches each one in turn before sipping the whiskey.

‘You know I don’t know why I keep drinking this,’ he says conversationally to Harold who continues to pant enthusiastically at him. ‘Much prefer gin. Force of habit I suppose.’

He finishes the whiskey and shoves the glass beneath the armchair before allowing himself to slide completely onto the floor. Harold, deeply confused about his master’s sudden presence at their altitude of the world, whines. Alsace just wiggles before getting up and standing to look at him with confusion. He pets both of them.


	4. Chapter 4

Thursday night comes quick enough and Downey considers various options for discreetly entering the Patrician’s Palace. Knees and elbows become a little more tender with age and do protest scaling up walls more often than is strictly necessary. Simple evasion and stealth seems the easiest answer.

The staff and guards are the easiest to pass, it’s the Dark Clerks that pose the real interesting challenge. Though In Downey’s favour, most have been trained at the Assassins’ Guild so he knows their repertoire.

‘Someone is going to end up dead one of these days,’ Vetinari greats him as Downey appears from a side door. ‘You are allowed to enter in the normal fashion. I have you down for a late night meeting on, let us see, ah taxes and concerns regarding the Undertaking.’ He smiles. Downey rolls his eyes.

‘I have to keep in practice somehow.’

‘Indeed. Thud? Or backgammon?’

Downey considers his options and chooses the later game thinking he might actually have a chance to win it. They settle in easily enough and the first few turns are spent in relative quiet. It is Downey who breaks it first saying that it’s August.

No one celebrates August. It is a miserable month.

‘Yes,’ Vetinari agrees. ‘It is very much August.’

‘Which makes it...seventeen years next week?’

‘Yes.’

Downey considers this for a long moment. He has never been one much for politics barring the necessary maneuvers to maintain the hegemony of the Assassins’ Guild over all other guilds. When events happen, and gods do events  _ happen _ , he treads water in whatever manner he thinks best for surviving. After some poking about and finding himself where he didn’t want to be he has learned this is best done by stepping back and watching other people walk over the fog covered cliffs to their metaphorical political demise.

Last week Lord Venturi came to him and said, ‘so about kings, eh?’ And Downey had wondered aloud if the man had lost something because clearly his brain had taken itself off somewhere for a day.

‘Been there, done that,’ he had said. ‘Multiple times. Time to stop kicking horse. It’s dead.’

‘But you know those old rumours.’

Downey had wished to reply with something his students often said which was ‘sounds fake but alright.’ Instead he had told Venturi, in very polite language, to get fucked. He maintains that while Vetinari is not a pleasant man he does maintain a pleasant state of affairs and it would be bad for the Assassins’ Guild to upset it too much.

Vetinari had always been the true political animal between the two of them. Downey just sort of went wherever the easiest life was on offer. Currently, it was the position of head master of the Assassins’ Guild. Who know, he thinks, it could be something entirely different tomorrow.

Currently Vetinari is winning. Some things never change. Downey scowls at the bored.

‘This is deeply unfair,’ he says.

‘I never knew you were a man for fairness.’

‘You always win.’

‘Very well, what would you like to play?’

Downey thinks, Nothing. Because you win no matter what. Becoming churlish he says that it doesn’t matter. They can do whatever Vetinari wants. He’s just tired is all.

‘Do you want something to drink?’ Vetinari offers as he closes the backgammon board.

‘No.’

‘Alright.’

Downey sighs and rubs his eyes and changes his answer to yes, fine he’ll have something. Whatever you have. Vetinari returns with gin for Downey and whiskey for himself. Downey wonders about this lack of ability to talk. They managed it for a time, before any sort of Thing had begun but now all Downey can think to do is snap and snarl.

This is always the case with him. Someone says, ‘let us do a thing together’ and Downey initially says, ‘sure sounds grand’ then he goes and sabotages it by being a massive cunt.

Vetinari is waiting. Downey still cannot think of anything to say. Or he can think of a great many things but does not feel in the mood to talk about them. Maybe they should just fuck and get it over with. Downey thinks, That’s one area where I generally know what I’m doing. And you don’t have to be stared at and expected to say something that will amaze the whole room.

The whole room, of course, consisting of them and Mr. Fusspot who is asleep.

‘How is your father?’ Vetinari asks when the silence becomes ridiculous.

‘No idea. Dying still, I assume.’

Vetinari tilts his head to the side, ‘you have not visited him? I thought that was the point of your missive last week.’

‘No I didn’t visit him. I thought I might but then decided it was a pointless task so didn’t.’

Downey can tell Vetinari wants to ask more but something like manners is preventing him. Downey briefly considers taking pity on the man before deciding that he doesn’t want to talk about any of it so changes the subject.

‘I am serious about the Undertaking,’ Downey says.

‘I thought you would like the planned stop near the guild. It is a benefit I am given to understand.’

‘Again, I’m not against it in principle. This, what do you call it, Public Transit, seems all right. It will add a new level to inhumation practices, keep students on their toes. I just don’t want the noise of construction.’

Vetinari states that he fails to see how this can be resolved. You cannot have one without the other. This is, he continues, the issue with what his engineers call ‘transformative projects.’ No one is ever satisfied. No one wants the construction but they do want the service and when the service is finally available it is not  _ exactly _ what they envisioned and so it is therefore deemed terrible.

‘Well,’ Downey sighs. ‘That’s your problem. Massaging the masses into acceptance. Or just forcing it on them regardless. I still don’t want construction during the school year.’

‘That’s nine months of the year.’

‘Plus summer courses.’ Downey does a finger gun with a quirked eyebrow as he says this.

Vetinari looks up to the ceiling and murmurs something about city officials and their impossible expectations.

‘So when should we build it?’

‘The four weeks between summer and fall semester.’

‘Now you’re being ridiculous on purpose.’

‘I am never ridiculous on purpose your lordship. I am always a very serious man. Ask around. That Mr. Downey, people say, very serious. Never smiles. Just casually practices evolutionary elimination.’

Vetinari hums and wonders aloud what the offering of poisoned almond slices counts as. It’s not inhumation per-se so would it be murder, then? Downey shakes his head and argues for randomized self selection.

‘If someone takes them they’re an idiot and deserve what they get.’

‘But not all the are poisoned is that correct?’

‘Überwald roulette.’

‘You need to get out more, Downey.’  

‘What? It’s funny.’

Vetinari again looks at the ceiling and Downey feels chuffed that he managed to make him laugh twice in the evening. He scours his mind for other topics to discuss that are safe and not at all personal but Vetinari seems determined to thwart him.

‘Your reluctance to see your father-’

‘We really don’t need to talk about me.’

‘It doesn’t have anything to do with that summer you were thrown out of the house does it?’

‘Nah, that was ages ago. I probably deserved it. Elder Downey and younger Downey just don’t have much in common.’

‘That is, technically, not a good reason to not see someone who is dying. Has he asked for you?’

‘Doubtful.’

‘I see.’

Downey doesn’t think Vetinari does see but that’s hardly the patrician’s fault, he is only working with a quarter of the information.

‘Your dad, you know him?’

Vetinari starts then shakes his head, ‘my father died when I was three. Though I have heard that he and I are very different people. He apparently took life a lot less seriously.’

‘Well, perhaps for the best then.’

‘That he died?’

Downey shrugs. Vetinari rolls his eyes and gets them both another drink but he does not disagree with Downey which makes the assassin think that the point stands.

They clink glasses and Downey slides further down the chair. The room is too warm in the way everything is too warm in summer in Ankh-Morpork. There is a twist of lime in the gin and his mouth feels like cotton and tastes like pine. He thinks about cold drinks filled with alcohol you cannot taste because of the fruit and sugar and ice. He remembers Ludo making something from Klatch that was mostly grapefruit and liquor and adoring it. He had gotten very drunk off several of them and had then chain smoked in a back alley with De L’Enfer. After, he and Ludo broke into the guild kitchens and made terrible drunk food.

His stomach recoils at the memory but at the time it had been as divine as the cocktails.

He catches sight of Vetinari contemplating him and he explains, ‘just remembering some terrible meal I made with Ludo at three in the morning once.’

‘I am eternally pleased that I get to live vicariously through your self-destructive drunk phase rather than going through such a thing personally.’

‘It involved beans, rice, blue cheese, eggs and hot sauce.’

‘That sounds revolting.’

‘Ludo said, “this is a bit much for me” and threw up. Though that could have been the liquor. I remember being happy about it because I got to eat his portion.’

‘Ever the supportive friend.’

‘I held his hair back, I was there for him. And I bought him a pack of menthols the next morning.’  

Vetinari looks as if he is about to say something but retreats from whatever half formed sentiment had entered his mind. He instead reopens the backgammon board and suggests they have one more round. Downey grumbles but hauls himself upright and says that he gets to go first regardless of how the dice roll. Vetinari, being gracious, allows it. They play until half two in the morning before Vetinari notes the time and says that they had best call it a night. Downey finds his hat and coat and awkwardly says good evening, or morning, at the door before deciding that things need to be a little more firm than this and so leans in and kisses the dratted man.

‘Hold the council meeting at a less insufferable time,’ he says as they pull away.

‘I shall schedule it for six in the morning and tell everyone it was at your behest.’

‘Cruel man, fine. We’ll all sweat together in the sauna of the Rat’s Chamber. Except for Slant who is a vampire and doesn’t seem to wilt in the heat.’

‘Go home Downey.’

‘I’m going, I’m going. Ta.’ He touches the brim of his hat in a mock farewell and slips back into the shadows of the hallway.

When he glances back up at the palace as he walks towards the guild he can see the fleeting silhouette of the patrician leaving the window.

_Askesis_ is not something he has ever known. That desire for control and self-discipline and living a rigorous  life of an aesthete.

Is there self-control in their pretences? This Thing they are pretending is so casual and ephemeral cannot remain as it is. The centre cannot hold. Either they must speak of it or let it drift away. It has only been a few months but remains terrifying.

Downey thinks, He was watching me. He feels pleased until he realizes that they both had turned back and looked. It reminds him of that story of the woman who turned into salt for looking.  In religious history wanting knowledge never seems to benefit anyone which means he would have been fine, Vetinari on the other hand… 

_Askesis_ in love is a form of madness. To want self-control in the midst of love, that most revealing and maddening emotion, is insanity. Downey doesn’t know if it is him who wants this iron-clad way of behaving or if he is adopting dog-botherer’s approach to life. When he has loved before it has always been a consuming experience, until he cocked it up of course. But for the time it had existed between him and another it was never a suppressed experience. Discreet, of course. Hidden, naturally. But suppressed? Controlled? Stilted? No. Want love and wanting control at the same time,  _ that _ is insanity. 

Well, he thinks, I wouldn’t be the first in our family to find madness in such a way.

 

/

 

Sicily knows that he knows. She shadows his movements and glares at him whenever they make eye contact. Downey thinks this obnoxious. He hates her face with its small nose, small mouth, narrow chin. Everything is pinched and her voice crawls beneath his skin. He thinks that if she weren’t his sister he’d have Ludo inhume her if only to get rid of yet another annoying person. 

There are so many of them. He chafes against the world and the peoples within it. He is angry at everything because he is home. 

‘I could tell dad,’ Downey says to get a rise. Sicily is hanging out laundry on the line and throws a clothespin at him. ‘You and Rob make a cute couple. Both kind of ugly, both complete scags.’ 

She sticks her tongue out at him and calls him a cunt. He just grins. This makes her more furious. 

Magda walks out the back and grabs Downey by the shoulder and hauls him back inside snapping that he had best behave himself. What did Sicily do to deserve his foulness? 

‘Oh I don’t know, sister-mine,’ Downey says as he pulls away from her in the kitchen. ‘She just pisses me off. Oh, one time she stole my books on exotic poison theory.’ 

‘How much of a struggle your life is.’ 

‘And she always tattles to dad whenever I do anything.’ 

‘Are the things you’re doing usually what you’re not supposed to be doing?’ 

Downey shrugs, ‘not as such. Like last week. I go for a walk because I can’t sleep and then the next morning Sicily says to dad that I’m sneaking around then dad takes issue with me and threatens to put bars on the windows. Says that I can’t be up to any good walking around the city at midnight.’ 

Magda shoves a bowl of potatoes and a peeler into his lap. Their mother walks in and both go quiet. She eyes them suspiciously. 

‘Gossip?’ She asks. Both say, ‘no, mum.’ ‘Speaking ill of others? You know the rule, if you can’t say anything nice…’ 

They chorus back grudgingly, ‘then don’t say anything at all.’ 

Their mother nods and begins taking out ingredients for the evening meal. She arranges them in neat order on the countertop before turning with great deliberation to Downey who is wearing a peevish expression and peeling potatoes. 

‘I spoke with your dad last night.’ 

Downey can feel himself become warm. He focuses on the potatoes in order to not sweat. 

‘He had a lot to say.’ 

Downey thinks that she should just cut to the chase. He chest feels hollow. 

‘He thinks you’ve spent enough time at the guild and he is not going to pay for you to continue on. It is time for you to grow up and do your duty by the family.’ 

He nods. He peels more potatoes. Magda is quietly peeling garlic. 

‘So that means going to work everyday and staying at work all day. Will, you run off part way through!’

The disappointment in her voice is plain. Downey is cringing inside. How can he explain that the work is dull and he gets bored and it seems like much more fun to run about Ankh-Morpork with old childhood mates? He thinks the minimal he does is enough. He didn’t ask to be a merchant. He didn’t ask to be born into this family. He didn’t ask for any of it. And if dad wanted his son to be a measly merchant he should have apprenticed him at the Merchants’ Guild rather than the Assassins’. 

But here they are with Downey over-educated for the world his dad wants him to inhabit. He does not want to look at luxury goods of silks, furs, spices, teas, velvets pricked out in gold and silver, carpets people walk on instead of hang up, oranges, mangoes, pineapples. He wants to indulge in them. He wants to eat them, wear them, drink them, smell them. He does not want to look at and sell them on to his betters. He wants to be the betters who buy them. 

‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbles. And he is sorry. Sorry that his mother is disappointed in him, not sorry for running off. 

‘Your dad and I just want what is best for you. You and your sisters. Which means you should learn your business and start looking towards the future. If you don’t how will you provide for your wife and children? How will you be seen in the world?’ 

Downey mumbles another apology and a vague promise to do better. At this moment Sicily walks in with the empty laundry basket and a smirk of triumph. 

‘Have fun with dad,’ she says. 

‘Go away,’ Downey snaps. 

She leans in close to whisper, ‘you tell dad about the other night and I’ll tell him that you’re spying on your betters and that it was you and your mates who graffitied the Merchant Guild Hall with rude words and images.’ 

Downey glares.

‘Imagine how he’d take that. Him, too, the Guild’s bursar. A respected member of the community, a pillar, and he can’t even control his own son. Dad would be ashamed and you know what he’s like when he’s embarrassed and angry.’ 

Downey shrugs. Sicily takes this as a yes and flounces off. Magda turns and gives him a warning look. He knows she has an inkling of what was exchanged although she long ago gave up attempting to mediate between them. 

Get caught between Sicily and him and you are liable to lose a limb. 

 

/

 

Jacob is waiting by Lion’s Head pub and they nod to each other as they enter independently of one another. Downey had wanted to meet at a place further away from his house but Jacob had insisted in his letter that he wanted to see Downey’s neighbourhood. To ‘understand how you came to be who you are.’ Downey does not think walking around this area will result in any understanding of who he is but Jacob is more romantic than him so he lets it lie. 

‘Going to kill my sister,’ Downey says by way of ‘hello, how are you.’ 

‘Oh?’ 

‘She’s the worst person on the Disc and there’s a long list of Worst People On The Disc. She’s right up there.’ 

Jacob orders them both beer and they abscond to a shadowed corner booth and clink mugs. Downey can feel Jacob pressing his leg against his calf and shoots a warning look. 

‘This isn’t the time or place,’ he hisses. Jacob nods but doesn’t move. Downey shifts back. ‘Anyway, how has your summer been?’ 

‘Dull. So, so dull. Father says that I cannot go travelling as I had planned. Oh no, I must stay home and work on my lessons. Apparently my grades weren’t up to his standards. Everyone else is travelling. You know, when we get back to the guild that’s all they’ll talk about and what will I have to say to the other lads? I got to know the inside of the family music room very well.’ 

Downy makes a sympathetic noise. He thinks Jacob very handsome in this light. But then, he knows, he considers Jacob very handsome in most lights. 

‘I got your recent letter. Your father sounds like an absolute boar,’ Jacob continues. ‘I mean, I don’t know, do you like working with him?’ 

No, Downey thinks. I hate it. But he does not wish to explain the entirety of his dad at this moment. He does not want Jacob to look at him differently and so says, ‘oh it’s not great but it could be worse.’ 

‘I cannot wait to get back. Fathers, eh?’ 

Downey smiles and says, ‘oh yes, fathers. What a thing.’ 

They diverge from the subject and spend the evening speculating about Ludo’s mysterious love life and whether or not dog-botherer’s aunt is a whore or just an escort. When they part Jacob squeezes his hand and leans in for a kiss but Downey pulls away. 

‘As I said, this isn’t the time or place.’ 

‘You said that in the pub. We’re in a pitch black alleyway at midnight. No one will see us.’ 

Downey remains uncertain. He hates that he is uncertain and he is worried that Jacob will like him less if he refuses and so he sighs and allows the kiss which turns into a little more than just a kiss. He wonders what Jacob thinks of him, now that he is on the subject of how he appears to others. His family is nothing to Jacob’s. Sure, they have enough for their son’s beautiful education but that’s about it. He has seen his dad’s account books. He knows how tight they are because the Assassins’ Guild is not cheap. 

This is why he cannot just say, ‘my dad is a scag.’ Because he is and he also is not. He is a piece of shit but also he scrimped and saved and tightened his belt so his son could go to the school of his choice. He does not know how to talk about his dad. He thinks he does not really need to know how provided no one inquiries. 

Pulling away Downey says that really, it is time, they should both go home and Jacob gives him a cheeky smile and a quick second kiss. 

‘Next week?’ Jacob whispers. ‘We can go somewhere else.’ 

‘Sure, next week.’ 

They part in opposite directions. Downey can feel his lips and his hands where Jacob had been holding them and every part of his body that had been touched. It is exhilarating. The sweating walls of Ankh-Morpork buildings are beautiful in smog-filtered moonlight. The faint smell of the river awash with waste is charming. Everything looks better and he thinks that while he has never been in love before whatever this is, infatuation, desire, longing, he likes it. Ugliness loses its monstrosity to become angelic. 

Returning home he takes a different window into the house and slips quietly upstairs. Walking down the hall he hears the sound of a door closing. He shifts, looks down the hall but no one is there. It’s just the house settling, he tells himself. And if it was someone he was just out for a walk. He always goes out for walks being that he can never sleep. 

Slipping beneath the covers and he presses his grinning face into the pillow. Perhaps summer won’t be so absolutely dreadful after all. 

 


	5. Chapter 5

The guild teacher meeting is going slowly with most discussions focusing on how to encourage thirteen year olds to practice basic hygiene, especially after their physical practicum class.

‘Just chuck deodorant at them,’ Downey suggests. ‘That’s what I do. I explain puberty to them then tell them they all smell foul and chuck free deodorant at them.’

Mericet, Guild Under Master, makes a less than impressed facial expression at Downey. Downey grins at him. He says that no one has complained yet but as soon as a single parent raises an overly inbred eyebrow he’ll stop.

‘You haven’t changed since you were a lad,’ Mericet sighs. Mericet sighs more than speaks. He is a man who lives through sighing. ‘Still throwing things at unsuspecting people who have done nothing to deserve it.’

‘I have poison theory with twenty thirteen year olds at two in the afternoon after physical education and you’re telling me they don’t deserve it?’

‘It’s worse in the winter,’ Lady T’Malia says. ‘We can’t open the windows unless we want to freeze.’

‘I do.’ Downey says. T’Malia rolls her eyes. ‘I tell them it’s character building.’

T’Malia leans forward and pushes a paper towards Downey. ‘This is an action plan for addressing student hygiene after phys-ed. I drafted it up last night and if nothing else, it will hold us over for the interim when term begins in September. The city doesn’t cool down until late November the earliest.’

Downey takes up the paper and he and Mericet give it a read over. Mericet nods in approval and Downey agrees that it seems like the best option for the moment. Next item on the agenda, parents concerned about health education.

Downey rubs the bridge of his nose, ‘this has been an ongoing issue ever since we opened the guild to girls. Parents become precious about biology when girls are suddenly involved.’

Mericet leans over to his briefcase and pulls out a stack of papers. ‘These are letters we have received complaining that sex education is being taught, that students are learning about their basic biology, and that we are opening their minds to depraved practiced.’

T’Malia in an aside to Madame Da Balourd, ‘assassination isn’t depraved but telling kids to be smart when having sex is?’

Ignoring her stage whisper Downey takes the stack of letters from Mericet and pulls one up at random to read over. ‘Here is an example,’ he says. ‘Dear Lord Downey and Mr. Mericet, the usual opening, ah here, “it has come to our attention that students are being taught biology in first year. Eleven is too young and impressionable to be learning about their bodies and may lead to depraved and animalistic thoughts”.’ Downey waits until the incredulous laughs subside. ‘Trust me, I cannot make this up. This concerned parent continues, “If students must learn about how their bodies work at such an impressionable age I demand that they be separated. Boys have no reason to learn about how those things work with girls.” I can only assume the parent means uterus, ovaries and menstruation. “And girls do not need to know about those things with boys. Neither should be concerned about the other and I demand you make such changes or desist in teaching biology to young students all together”.’

Madame Da Balourd interjects, ‘the parent is aware we’re not teaching sex-ed to eleven year olds right? Just basic outline of how different bodies work.’

‘Who knows,’ Downey says. ‘What is needed is a draft reply from us all explaining the curriculum and why we begin teaching this to the first years.’

As ideas are shunted about the table an aid knocks on the door, enters and comes to Downey. He leans down and whispers, ‘there’s a woman to see you, sir.’

‘Name?’

‘A Mrs. Carter, sir.’

Downey racks his brain for a Mrs. Carter and it comes to him in a rush. Oh, he thinks,  _ oh. _

‘I’ll be with her momentarily.’

Standing his says, ‘my apologies, something has come up. Mr. Mericet will take over for the remainder.’   
  
  


How quickly can a contract be taken out on an individual? Instantly, of course. Retroactively, even. It’s a matter of the inhumation itself and he can hardly pay himself to do it. Mrs. Carter. Mrs. Sicily Carter nee Downey.

Death brings out the low, base creatures of the earth. The wasps and beetles and creatures that feed on the dead, plant their futures in decayed flesh. As someone whose livelihood depends upon the creation of the dead he does not begrudge these creatures their existence. He still does not have to like them.

 

Sicily is sitting in the antechamber to Downey’s office and looking very green when he arrives in that her dress is green, her shoes an emerald satin, her kid-skin gloves embroidered with a mossy design.

‘Mrs. Carter,’ Downey greets with a formal bow.

‘Lord Downey,’ she stands with hand extended. He does not take it. They remain at a brief impasse until Downey gestures to his office and they silently enter.

‘Would you like a drink, Mrs. Carter?’ He asks as Sicily seats herself and adjusts the skirts of her dress. Alsace and Harold watch in quiet, canine silence.

‘Please.’

He pours them both a glass of port.

Sicily waits before speaking. She is clearly working something out in her head and Downey wonders what could possibly have brought her here. It has been years since they last spoke more than a few words to each other in passing and neither has ever, since birth, sought each other out willingly.

But things change, he owes. This summer has been a summer of change, even if the change can be seen in only one or two things.

‘John’s dead.’ She states, finally.

‘John?’

‘My husband.’

‘Oh.’

He has a vague recollection of a man with blond hair, ruddy face and very broad shoulders. He wonders at Sicily coming here as there was no contract out on him.

‘I didn’t kill him,’ she says defensively.

‘I didn’t say you had.’

‘You were thinking it.’

‘I was assessing the ledger. No John Carter mentioned to my recollection.’

She purses her lips and returns to her contemplative manner. Once finished with the port she says, ‘I came home and he was dead on the floor of the vestibule. Dressed to go out riding and just there, dead.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘He was murdered.’

‘And you know this how?’

‘His brains were all over the newly stained floors.’

‘Go to the cops. That’s why they exist.’

Sicily recoils at the thought and Downey considers that perhaps she had done the deed herself. He would put nothing past her, coniving gutter snape that she is.

‘I had wanted to check first.’

‘That it wasn’t one of my own?’

‘That it wasn’t you.’

Downey sits back. He had not expected that. Surely she knew that if he was going to target anyone in the family it would be her, not her husband who, to his knowledge, was a harmless and deeply uninteresting sort.

‘No,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you. If it had been, were you going to blackmail me with it? It’s an old tradition of ours, after all.’

‘I can hardly blackmail an assassin with a dead body. It goes with the job description.’

‘I’m sure you’d’ve found a way.’

She smiles an unkind smile. Downey returns the sentiment.

Rising to go she gingerly brushes off her skirts and adjusts her hat. He does not stand to see her to the door and he knows she does not expect him to. She says, ‘I never did like the colour black. I suppose we will be dressed the same for the next year.’

‘More’s the pity.’

She sneers down her nose before swishing from the room.

Downey waits half an hour before hauling out the Guild account books and double-checking for any mention of John Carter. There is no sign of the man’s name, not even a J.C. or a Carter or a John. William Lionshead, Daisy Wilkins, Lord Charles Selachii, Thomas ‘Simpering Smile’ Thompson. Nothing even remotely similar to John Carter.

If Sicily is here before her required visit to the Watch to report a suspicious death, assuming she does so, it is only a matter of time before the Watch comes banging about his guild halls. It is a prospect that makes his skin crawl. 

Would Vetinari allow him to put a moratorium on Watch members entering Assassins’ Guild premises? Most likely not. The man was far too dedicated to the idea of no one being above the law. Something about justice and civility and freedom and consequences. He had been lectured at more than once about it. He still thinks it’s all a bunch of bull.

 

/

  
  


Downey’s father is one of the more illustrious members of the Merchant’s Guild, a position he holds onto with tight, unceasing grip. Sailor’s tattoo their knuckles with ‘hold fast’ for good luck against the ravages of squalls and the whims of the ocean. Amos Downey has ‘hold fast’ imprinted into his mind. He guards his social standing with as much fervour as he guards his goods. 

The family speciality? Saffron, cardamom and incredibly difficult to find teas. He can also get silk, cambric and lace of superb quality at reasonable rates for special customers of long standing. The ones who pay their bills on time are his particular favourites. 

Lines of credit and lines of family relations create the web of a merchant’s life and that web extends out from two central nodes of Ankh-Morpork and Genua. There are cousins in Pseudopolis, in-laws in Sto Helit, nieces and nephews in Burundi, even more cousins in Klatch. If you want something you tug on the line and see what is shuffled your way. You pay your workers and captains and handlers and accountants on borrowed dime and they pay their assistants and sailors and clerks on borrowed coin and on down the line. You just hope your customers are timely in their payment of you for that beautiful chest of velvet you procured, that delicate lace working, that sensual tea and spice.

This year, cardamom is in demand.  Downey is at the docks with his father Amos waiting for a ship due in to port with several pounds of the stuff. Alongside them are a few heavies for merchants might aspire to lordships but they’re only a step and a half away from thugs. 

‘I have it split between ten buyers,’ Downey’s father explains. ‘I want you to manage a quarter of this transaction. It will do you good to have some first hand experience.’ 

Downey is counting the ways in which it would not do him good but he isn’t about to contradict his father and so he agrees with a nod. They stand watching the sun rise and the city begin its ritual of waking up. Downey wonders if there is anything he should say to his father but cannot think of a subject other than the one he most certainly cannot bring up which is further studies at the Guild. 

He thinks that his proposed project on isolating and studying the effects of poisonous fungi is unique enough to warrant the merit of graduate work. Even Dog-botherer would be impressed and that is a young man who is very difficult to impress. The one paper they ever wrote together is testimony enough to Downey of Dog-botherer’s far too obsessive ways. 

He corrected it ten times! Ten major revisions! For a term project! Downey thinks that the man was addled with the Tomlin scene at the cafe. Seeing a fellow assassin being strung up by one of the patrician’s own men is unnerving. 

Dog-botherer had said something about states and power and Downey hadn’t followed half of it but figured he understood the gist which could be condensed down to, ‘this is fucked, Snapcase is a scag.’   
  


Their day passes in mostly strained quietude. Downey does reason that the strained-ness is mostly on his end since he has no idea if his father feels it at all. He had always been a  flinty-eyed and quiet man. 

‘Am I doing well? Who knows,’ Downey complains to Magda that night. ‘Dad sure as hell isn’t saying anything. He looked over the accounts when I was done with them today and said, “that’ll do”.’ 

‘It sounds like you’re getting on.’ Magda, ever philosophical, is working the stitching on an old shift. She sits on Downey’s floor with prim composure and watches her brother flopping about with resignation. ‘Mum was worried.’ 

‘Oh?’ Downey lies with his head hanging off the bed so he is staring at her upside down. 

‘She thought you’d two would have had a blow out by now.’ 

‘Nah. Dad and I don’t do blow outs.’ 

‘Mum was worried.’ 

‘Dad never yells. He just gets ominous and even more quiet. Scarier than half my teachers when he’s furious.’ 

Magda continues sewing. Downey rolls over and reaches out to poke her forehead. 

‘What?’ She says. 

‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’ 

‘I’m thinking it’s late and we should be a’bed.’ 

Downey says that she lies. Magda replies that she does not. The needle is tucked into the lining and she stands, dusting off skirts. 

‘Be careful, Will.’ 

‘I shall. Those spice traders will cut a man as soon as look at him.’ He is grinning as he says it but Magda’s face remains stern and so he adopts a more sober appearance. ‘Be careful about what? I am an assassin so it can’t be for my physical safety.’ 

‘Three more were hung up today.’ 

‘No concern of mine.’ 

‘They were all assassins, Will.’ 

‘I’m not taking contracts out on the Patrician so I repeat, no concern of mine.’ 

Magda kisses his forehead and he knows she is unconvinced. Ever since Snapcase become Patrician Magda looks at him intently, like it is the last time she is going to see him. He finds it deeply annoying. He isn’t Ludo, he isn’t Dog-botherer, he isn’t anyone who matters. 

If you keep your head down, don’t trouble the waters, don’t make too much noise then you can weather anything, he thinks as Magda returns to her room. He takes out paper to write to Jacob. Snapcase being a paranoid old wanker doesn’t shock him. All patricians become paranoid old wankers. It is the nature of the position. You might enter the Palace at the prime of life, a healthy forty, charming, caring but within a week you lose your looks, your health and your sanity. 

Goodness, too, Dog-botherer had pointed out when they had worked on that joint paper all those (four, it was four) years ago. You lose your goodness as well. 

Downey thinks that most people who aim for the Patricianship have little goodness in them to begin with. It goes with the territory. Power hungry and lacking morals. But at least sane, before the Palace. At least sensible and with class. 

That is perhaps the one thing that irks him about Snapcase. The man has no class. If you aren’t going to have morals, and why would you?, at least have class.   
  
Finishing with a brief mending of his pen Downey writes. 

  
  
‘I have come to the conclusion that being a good pillar of society is overrated. I’ve been working with my dad for a month now and he never has any fun. He doesn’t go out, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t have friends.

This is my dad’s life: waking at four, temple for morning observances, home for breakfast, to the docks, to the Guild Hall (not nearly as nice as ours), to the office, back to the Hall, home, his counting room, bed. I share perhaps a paragraph with him over the course of the entire day. 

Dad said that all assassins are wicked men and that is the primary reason he disliked my attending the Guild. He does not wish for a wicked son. 

Oh well. 

The earth, quickened with whatever evil purpose I am paid to carry out, shall greet me with poisonous shrubs. I will make barren and blasted spots where, in due course, there will grow deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness our foul climate would produce. They would flourish, these plants, with hideous luxuriance. 

I am in a hideous mood. 

You wrote to say that we should see each other again but I cannot think that wise. My sister, the disgusting younger one, lurks behind corners and in alleys more quiet-footed than an Assassin. She’d rat me out for the fun of it. She’s like the Gentry in folklore: break the world just to hear the sound it makes as it shatters. 

I cannot see you again this summer. Please, please do not tempt me hither. I can resist everything except temptation.’ 

Jacob, of course, does not listen and writes back with beautiful language and the letter smells of roses dying in summer heat and Downey maintains that steady terror of being unable to say no for fear of losing him. 

 

/

  
  


‘You write many letters, brother,’ Sicily says sweetly. It is morning and Downey is not yet fully awake. 

‘I’ve friends.’ 

‘That you write to late at night and are so secretive that you will not read their replies at table.’ 

Downey glares and is about to retort when Amos enters and all go quiet. 

Breakfast is eaten thusly and afterwards Downey trudges down to the docks with Amos. He can see his life blurring together before him. A dark, tangled web of the same thing every day. Going down to the port he and Amos are greeted by fellow merchants, grocers and other early risers. They know him by name. They say, good mornin’ Mr. Downey, young master William. He does not want them to know his name. He does not want to be part and parcel of this salt ridden cog in the machine of Ankh-Morpork. 

‘Oh.’ 

Downey squints at a person sitting atop several barrels of wine floated down the river and hauled up to be sold. 

‘Downey,’ Vetinari says. He is surprised for eyebrows are raised. 

‘Dog-botherer,’ Downey replies. 

Downey can feel his father’s eyes as hooks in the back of his neck and so he says, stiffly, ‘dad this is a colleague, Havelock Vetinari. Vetinari my father, Amos Downey.’ 

Vetinari uncoils from the top of the barrel and offers his hand which Amos shakes with great warriness. Downey wishes that Dog-botherer weren’t in full assassin regalia. It would make everything less awkward. It is clear Amos wishes to wash his hand, as if the stain of the blood on the assassin’s hand would translate to his. 

Maybe, a distant part of Downey’s mind conjures, this is why he stopped hugging me after I turned eleven. 

‘A pleasure,’ Vetinari says. ‘Will I see you at the Guild in September?’ 

Downey mutters that he isn’t sure but possibly yes. Vetinari nods and bids good day and Downey is certain that he is sneering. Of course Dog-botherer would sneer. Here he is at the docks at six in the morning in work clothes while Vetinari is in perfect assassin attire. Quite probably he just finished a job. Quite probably he is going back to the guild to work on some paper or project that is going to make the teachers all wet themselves. Scag. Turning on his heel he stalks after his dad to their supplier muttering about how unfair it all is. 

 

/

 

Vetinari writes to him, ‘menthols and chocolate milk were Madam’s favoured hangover cure.’ 

Downey beams at the paper. It is night and still hot. He does not know how it is still this hot and he is stripped down to night shirt and lying on the wooden floor with his dogs because they seem to have the best idea. Light is from a single candle and Downey lights the missive on fire then deposits it in the grate. Alsace licks his knee-cap and he scratches her ears but she is warm to the touch and oh gods Downey is desperate for the winter. 

Part of him had wanted to drag Vetinari off to bed the other night, just to get that initial moment over with, but the thought of another body touching his was revolting. 

‘My life is rebelling against me,’ he informs Alsace who looks at him with large, sympathetic eyes. ‘Well, not all of it.’ 

He checks that the letter was burnt in its entirety and finding everything destroyed to his satisfaction he takes himself to bed with a pint of water and sleeps on top of the sheets with window open, assassination attempts be damned.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

It’s as Robertson is shoving a fetal pig eye into Lee’s face when Downey is called out of the classroom. He reeks of alcohol, camphor and myrrh. His hands are cool and he can feel how dry his skin will be from handling embalmed pig parts.

‘Robertson you will not ruin your specimen by flinging it in Lee’s face. Lee sit down and stop antagonizing Robertson.’

‘Yeah, stop antagonizing me Lee,’ Robertson sticks his tongue out which Lee returns. 

‘Watch them for me,’ Downey sighs to Lady T’Malia. ‘Make sure Robertson doesn’t do anything to get himself inhumed.’

‘You leave me with such joy,’ T’Malia mutters as she strides in.

Stepping into the hall it smells deliciously of nothing but candle smoke. He brushes his coat down, makes sure he doesn't have ink smears or chalk dust on him and heads off to the front hall of the guild. He begins making a list of reasons as to why a certain commander of the city watch will not be allowed in. 

‘Lord Downey I have a warrant to search the premises.’ Vimes says without preamble. Downey sneers down his nose at him.

‘I don’t think so, commander. Classes are in session. It would disturb the students.’

‘Look here you, I got a warrant just like you wanted. I went all the way to the justices and got this bleeding piece of paper. You can read it.’

Downey would rather not. He had hoped requesting a warrant would have put the commander off for more than just four hours. The damn man is persistent.

‘Read it.’

It’s shoved into his face. Downey scowls at the little man in front of him and oh if only he’d stop smoking those foul smelling cigars. Delicately he pushes Vimes’ hand away and says, ‘I don’t really care, commander. Class is in session you aren’t coming in.’

‘That isn’t how this works.’ Vimes murmurs. Downey sighs. Behind Vimes is Captain Carrot and the blonde one. And some others whose names he never bothered to learn. All cops look the same. Beside him is the porter, Dr. Mericet and a senior boy on hall duty.

Personally, Downey would put money on his own team.

‘Really, commander? Pray tell how it _does_ work.’

 

See, the thing with events is they tend to gather around each other. It’s a clustering effect, Vetinari thinks. One thing occurs, let us say a carriage accident, then seven others around the same time. There is something to be drawn from that patterning. He assumes it has to do with resources, attention, the malleability of the human mind (what if it’s me? What if it’s my carriage? What if I mess up one day? Think these things obsessively then you’re not looking and oh, there you are. In the situation you created in your head. Or, all the resources of the state are taken up with fixing one thing that they cannot keep up with others. Things fall apart all at once. It’s terribly annoying).

In this case, Downey’s dying father, Vetinari assumes this to be natural causes. Downey’s apparently dead brother-in-law, unnatural causes. What’s next? Downey’s dead dogs?

Vetinari pauses. Oh no, he thinks, that’d be no good. Downey might actually react to that one.

In his experience people _do_ die in droves. His father, his mother, his grandfather and great aunt all apparently died within six months of each other. Deaths and marriages, they breed others of their own kind. He considers the clustering effect and thinks there is something to it that might be worth exploring one day. He adds it to the list of things he will pursue in his retirement.

 

Vimes is doing his thing of staring at the wall slightly to the left of the patrician’s chair.

‘He refused to let me into the guild, sir. So I got a warrant and he said that he didn’t care.’

‘And this is when you punched him?’

Vimes shifts.

Vetinari thinks it interesting how often Downey gets punched by Vimes. It’s only been twice, but still.

‘That is not an appropriate response to a civilian refusing to grant you entrance,’ Vetinari continues. ‘No matter how frustrating you find the situation, commander.’

‘He’s a public citizen, sir, and with all due respect,’ Vimes winces at those words. Vetinari smiles very brightly. ‘I had a warrant and Lord Downey was acting in flagrant disregard for the law.’

‘Indeed.’

From the hallway, ‘I want his badge with his head attached to it.’

Vetinari stares at the closed door. Vimes shifts again. This brings back memories of being hauled into Dr Follett’s office as a young man and Vetinari has sudden, eternal respect for the man’s patience. Young Vetinari sporting a black eye, young Downey with a shiner on his cheek and bloody nose. Or, that one time, a chipped front tooth and Vetinari’s hands were skinned.

Luckily for both assassin and policeman, neither seem keen on things escalating beyond Vimes’ occasional tempered reaction. But gods is it like corralling children.

‘What, exactly, are you hoping to find?’

Vimes relaxes a fraction. ‘Evidence relating to the murder of John Carter. He was found dead in his home yesterday by his wife and she is certain he was inhumed.’

Vetinari nods.

‘Based on what evidence?’

‘She found this,’ he produces a fragment of a letter with the guild’s unmistakable crest at the top. Vimes deposits the scrap on Vetinari’s desk and the patrician cannot help but note his unease. Too easy, Vetinari thinks. And he knows it. Assassin’s aren’t that clumsy. ‘I know,’ Vimes sighs. It is agnozied. ‘But I have to pursue all lines of inquiry.’

‘Indeed you must. Continue on, commander. I will speak with Lord Downey. Don’t let me detain you.’

 

Downey, coming in after Vimes, is a fury. This time it’s a black eye, not a bloody nose.

‘I want his badge.’

‘Not happening.’

‘I want him demoted.’

‘Not your call.’

‘I want _something_.’

‘He doesn’t actually think the guild is involved.’

‘That’s not what I mean and of course we’re not involved.’

Vetinari explains the piece of evidence found. He listens to Downey scoff for a few minutes. There is something behind the scoffing and Vetinari is curious if it will out itself. He thinks it might be anger, or frustration. With Downey they are usually one in the same. No, he thinks as Downey’s grumblings wind down, it is more anger and - how should it be put? It’s not resignation to the situation but, perhaps, a complete lack of _surprise_ at the situation.

‘Anyway,’ Downey sighs, seating himself without an invitation. ‘All of this to say, utter bollocks.’

‘Eloquent as always.’

‘Beautiful speeches in two hundred words is your job.’

Vetinari does not think that worthy of response. He puts it down to Downey being stressed and he says as much. Downey rolls his eyes.

Time for cause and effect since Downey is being unusually resistant to the silence-leading-to-people-wishing-to-fill-it approach. Downey is annoyed, angry, something like that. Unsurprised at the evidence, too. Which means he expected it to be there or, at least, would not have ruled it out. Which means he knew to expect things such as this; his brother-in-law’s death being pinned on the guild.

Why? Why would he expect that?

‘Did you get along with Mr. Carter?’

Downey blinks owlishly, ‘no.’

‘Ah.’

‘I didn’t know him.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

‘Does no one in your family speak to each other?’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘No.’

Vetinari hums. Making an ugly expression Downey pokes the bruised skin around his eye.

‘I want to press charges,’ he mutters. ‘The only problem is I’d be pressing charges to the man who punched me. There’s something wrong with that.’

‘There is,’ Vetinari agrees. ‘Don’t worry,’ he adds cheerfully, ‘I’ll have a proper word. Though you don’t help yourself by pushing the commander’s buttons. And he was within his rights to ask to see the guild. And he had a warrant.’  

‘Can’t help it.’

‘Yes you can.’

Downey sighs, ‘Just can’t stand his face. Do you know people like that? You look at their face and you just want to ruin things for them? Not in a mortal way, I don’t actually wish the commander dead. That said, if he died tomorrow I wouldn’t be put out but I also wouldn’t go out of my way for it.  Just...Gods I hate his face.’ Downey stops abruptly and shrugs. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter.’

Vetinari sighs, ‘Go home and put ice on your eye.’

‘It’s surprisingly not that painful.’

‘You look like a thug, Downey.’

‘Oh dear, can’t have that.’ A cheeky grin. ‘My dad once called assassins well dressed thugs, can’t be proving him right.’

‘I’m sad to say I think your father wasn’t far off from the truth. How is that going?’

‘No idea.’

‘You still haven’t seen him?’

Downey grousing, ‘you asked me that two days ago. Three days ago. He’s still alive. He’s taking his sweet time. It’s deeply annoying when people do that. So much spite in them they just hold on forever. Make you wait on tendrils until you’re salted, wiry flesh from the stress of it. He’s going to leave a lot of scar tissue.’

Vetinari wonders what he should say here. There are some confessions he does not know what to do with and most of Downey’s fall into that category. Though, perhaps, Downey wouldn’t consider them confessions. He falls into intimacy more easily than Vetinari, a skill he is oddly jealous of.

Uncertain of this ground Vetinari asks, ‘how are the plants?’

‘Oh,’ a pleased expression. ‘They’re well. I’ve managed to grow black bougainvilleas purely for the aesthetics.’

‘Fifteen-year-old you would be pleased.’

‘You have no idea. Fifteen-year-old Downey is beyond chuffed. Carter was hit on the head?’

‘That’s what the commander said.’

‘Fine.’

Vetinari stares. Downey stares back. Maybe, Vetinari thinks, the commander’s search of the guild won’t be as fruitless as he expects.

‘I hear your sister paid you a visit,’ Vetinari says as Downey puts his hat on and stands to leave. ‘That wouldn’t be at all related to the dead body of her husband would it?’

‘She wanted to test a theory.’

Vetinari looks at him expectantly. Downey leanes over the desk and kisses him. Before pulling away he whispers, ‘she wanted to know if I had done it.’

‘And did you?’

Downey kisses him again. ‘What do you think?’

‘Are you free tonight?’

‘I can be.’

‘Good.’

 

/

 

Amos spends their tea break at half three quietly explaining that Downey had best reconcile himself to his life. There is no shame in settling, his dad says. In fact, he is offended that Downey attaches any shame at all to their occupation.

Your occupation, Downey wants to snap. Not mine. I’m an assassin. Or going to be an assassin. _I_ am something _more_.

Amos continues adding that there is a nice young woman, Annabelle Thurough, who would be a good match for Downey. She is sensible, comes from a good family, and her father is in the weapons business. That should please Downey, shouldn’t it?

Downey imagines himself selling weapons to Dog-botherer, Ludo, Jacob. He is horrified. Embarrassed. Ashamed.

Downey is three and twenty, he had best start thinking about his future. He had best give up playing this assassin game. Amos and Amos’ bank account have humoured him enough. Time to be a man. Grow up. Make good by his family.

What future is there if he goes back for more schooling?

‘A doctorate dad,’ Downey murmurs. ‘It’s important.’

‘Why? What does it get you?’

Downey falters. Prestige, he wants to say. His father should understand that considering how much he values social standing. I’ll have the same letters after my name as Ludo and Dog-botherer so that’s something. It’s one more thing to inch me up the ladder towards Jacob.

‘So you don’t know,’ He dad settles it. ‘I thought as much. You’ve always avoided responsibility but not any more. You will meet Ms Thurough tomorrow at a dinner at her father’s house. You will dress well. You _will_ behave yourself.’

‘I can’t.’

‘What?’

Downey wants to kick himself. Amos stares. He is a large man. Tall, broad shouldered, sturdy. Good merchant stock. If you run into Amos you fall over.  Downey has his dad’s height and a bit of the shoulders but that’s it. There isn’t the same bulk. He is merely tall, his dad imposing.

‘Er, I have plans tomorrow night.’

‘Which are?’

‘With a friend.’

‘Who is?’

‘A friend. From the guild.’

‘Who is?’

‘Jacob de L’Enfer.’

Amos’ palms are flat on the table and he sits up more. Downey wants to disappear into his chair.

‘You haven’t met him,’ he adds hurriedly.

‘You did not ask to make plans.’

‘I know, I’m sorry.’

‘You will reschedule them with my approval.’

Downey nods, says he is sorry again. Amos’ shoulders relax slightly and so Downey apologizes a third time to be on the safe side. Amos nods, says that he has Downey’s best interest in mind and meeting the Thuroughs will be good for his future.

‘And you should come to the Guild Hall meeting tonight,’ Amos adds. ‘If you’re free of course.’

‘Of course, dad. I’m free.’

‘Assassins are nothing but well dressed thugs, Will, it is best you rid yourself of them.’

 

The rest of the day is spent with nervous energy and Downey cannot settle. Even later, after the Guild Hall meeting (dull, dull, dull), and supper and making sure to help and to be seen to help around the house, he is nervous. Fretfully he writes to Jacob. He cannot meet him tomorrow night, he is terribly sorry, his dad in his eternal wisdom has decided that he must meet his future bride.

‘It’s medieval,’ Downey writes. ‘We’re not chattle to be mated at the whims of our owners. But oh, dad goes on and on about her family’s connections and how it’s a good move for us and it’s just good business. If he likes them so much he should marry the girl. Gods knows he doesn’t much care about mom.

You don’t need to know any of this. Anyway, all of this to say I cannot meet you tomorrow night. I don’t know if I should be meeting you at all for the rest of the summer. My bitch of a sister keeps bothering me about all the letters we exchange so she’s up to something with that.

I hope your studies are well. I know it’s dreadfully boring but gods I’d give anything to be back with ten piles of books on obscure subjects and Ludo reciting elemental properties of poisons _ad nausea_. I miss your face. It’s stupid, I like it.

Don’t write to me immediately. Wait a few days. For my sake.’

 

The next day, hot and sultry, Downey lingers by the docks off Rime Street and throws rocks into the Ankh. He is supposed to be running an errand for his dad but it is too hot for business. In shirtsleeves he is bored. Bored and sweating. It’s too hot, he thinks, too hot for the gods, too hot for business, too hot for anything.

He throws another rock in. A man in a row boat crossing from bank to bank makes a rude gesture. Downey scowls.

‘Will,’ a whisper.

Downey glances around. Slight movement by barrels.

‘ _Will_.’

He scoots over and finds Jacob grinning.

‘Did you get my letter?’ Downey asks. He takes a quick glance around before grabbing Jacob’s hand and pulling him into an alley. ‘I can’t meet tonight.’

‘I know, so I came to see you now.’

‘I’m at work.’

‘Yes,’ a dry look. ‘Very...provincial.’

Downey flushes. He glares then mutters an apology. Jacob laughs, ‘why are you saying sorry? I don’t think I’ve ever heard you _say_ it. Anyway, whatever, your dad’s an asshole. We’ll meet up next week. It’s all fine.’

Oh but is it? Downey wants to know. Or are you just humouring me? The L’Enfers have balls and soirees and all sorts of beautiful, lucious social events and Jacob meets all sorts of beautiful, lucious people and they’re all surely more interesting and appropriate than him, William Downey, son of a merchant. Gods, what he’d do for a title. Any title will do. Just something to put in front of his last name.

‘Good,’ Downey says. ‘Good, but look I have to go. I’m already late. I was pissing about before you showed up and dad will kill me if I dick around any more.’

‘Your dad is _such_ an asshole.’

‘He’s not that bad, he means well you know. It’s just this is the only way he knows. Enter the merchant guild, buy stocks in ships, marry into a respectable family, have a bunch of children, hope at least some of them make it to adulthood. Rinse and repeat with the next generation.’

Jacob shakes his head. Amusement sits well on his face and Downey wishes it were night so he could kiss him. As it is, they’re standing a few feet apart terribly awkwardly and Jacob touches his arm, squeezes his shoulder, and says he should be off then.

‘I just wanted to see you,’ he says. ‘Have fun courting poor Miss Thurough tonight.’

‘I’ll be thorough about it.’

Jacob makes a face at him, ‘you have such a terrible sense of humour.’

‘Give me a few days and I’ll come up with something as good as Dog-botherer. Oh I saw him the other day which was weird. Seeing him outside of the guild.’

‘Is it? I suppose, I mean, I see him some of father’s do’s. Him and his aunt so you know, he’s around. Weird chap.’

‘Understatement but look, I have to go.’

‘Yes.’

Downey stares at Jacob and wants to explain everything but, at the same time, has no idea what everything is that he wants to explain. Mostly, he just wishes they were elsewhere and that he was someone else and that society wasn’t so damn beastly about certain issues.

‘Write me when you’re able,’ Jacob says. He stands close now and Downey can see the exact colour brown his eyes are, the freckles which are stardust on skin, the wide pupils.

‘I will.’

‘I keep all your letters.’

‘You should probably burn them.’

Jacob’s hand slide from shoulder to forearm. ‘Do you want me to?’

‘Yes.’

‘Allright.’

Downey squints at him. He wants to say that he wants so much but cannot manage the words. He wants to ask what is happening. He wants to know where things stand between them. He has so many questions and uncertainties but instead he smiles brightly.

‘I’ll find a time for us to meet. We’re going someone not in my neighbourhood.’

Jacob grins, ‘sure. You pick.’

‘Wallflower.’

‘You’re _such_ a wannabe Downey.’

Downey laughs, now, as he pulls away. ‘Yeah, well, I’ve never hidden it.’ They exit the alleyway back to Rime Street and there is sun and he finds the heat somewhat bearable now.

They part amiably and overperform the friendly hug and do long linger afterwards.

Walking back to his dad’s offices Downey catches sight of Sicily walking back towards home. She has a basket on her arm with produce and he thinks, She can’t have seen us. We were discreet. And besides, nothing happened. She can’t know anything.

She looks back over her shoulder, catches his eye, sneers. He makes a rude gesture. She returns it. They both stomp off towards their destinations.

 

/

 

Leaving the palace is a decompression. Downey doesn’t have much time for philosophies around the notion of entrenched trauma. How the land doesn’t forget the blood spilt. When a city, a building, is built on the backs of the dead it remembers and recalls and lets go most unwillingly.

He just doesn’t care. Everything is built on the backs of the dead. There are a lot of dead people on the disc. That is how it goes. Everything has had a traumatic history. Nothing is untouched by darkness, etc. etc. etc. There is no need, he thinks, to get dramatic about it. Buildings carry emotions. There is no magic to that.

But the palace has weight and ghosts and a blood stain unseen on Oblong Office floors. He put it there seventeen years ago. It’s right where the commander always stands. Or would have been, had Vetinari not had it removed and the floors re-stained.

It is not a happy place. You can always feel unhappy places. Though, Downey thinks, it’s improved greatly since seventeen years ago.

Ignoring that sidelong glances at his beautifully bruised face Downey takes himself on a walk. He feels bad for not returning to the guild to get Alsace and Harold but isn’t in the mood to put up with the commander who is more than likely pouring over the place with his fellow goulish coppers.

There are words he could say. He has speeches prepared. Most of them thought up at three in the morning when he wakes and is between sleeps. But they’d serve no purpose. They wouldn’t rectify thirty years of silence. He doesn’t think you can rectify thirty years of silence.

He had run into his mom once, six, seven years ago, he had just been made a lord and hadn’t recognized her at first. She had aged. Of course she had. Age happens. He has white hair and crows feet and smile lines. Vetinari has grey at his temples and crows feet and a permanent crease between eyebrows.

She had looked at him then looked at him again then clearly recognized him. They had been in the middle of the street, Rime Street, riverside. He had recognized her after she had recognized him and he has a feeling she knows it was in that order. He does not know how his mother must feel now, with an empty house and a dying husband. A woman who has only ever mothered, only ever wifed.

Mothering and wifing olden you. She had wanted to say something, he had been able to tell at the time, but he had just touched his hat and moved on.

Gods. He sighs. He is not ready to occupy this space of remembrance and possibility. What if, what if, what if.

His feet take him to his childhood street because it is one of those surreal days where you get punched by the Duke of Ankh at half eight in the morning, spend three hours in the patrician’s palace, then wander around the city as the cops ransack your guild looking for proof of a crime you didn’t commit.

He wonders if the house will smell the same. Look the same. Feel the same. He isn’t sure if he wants it to or not.

He goes up to the door, can feel the neighbours watching, and stares. The number is painted neatly in green and the front window garden tended to diligently. The little he can see in the front window it looks as neat and tidy as it always was.

His mom was, is, a clean woman.

The door opens and there she is holding a bag for the bin.

She stares at him. He stares back. She says, ‘good gods Will your face.’ And it’s like nothing has changed at all.


	7. Chapter 7

‘You’re well?’ Downey’s mom sits opposite him at the kitchen table. There is an untouched pot of tea between them and he is pressing a cold cloth to his face. ‘Apart from the eye.’ 

‘I’m well.’ 

She shifts and reaches for the pot then retracts. He watches every movement. Those fluttering hands, she had never seemed so small to him before. She is such a small woman. 

‘And you?’ He asks after a difficult internal wrestle. 

‘I bide as fine as one can. Though I don’t expect you’ve heard. Your father isn’t well.’ 

‘I know.’ 

‘Oh! You know.’ 

‘Yes. I know. Magda told me.’ 

‘Oh. That is good.’ Her face is reproachful. Downey picks up a teaspoon and twirls it in hand. ‘I didn’t know you two talked. She never said.’ 

‘No.’ 

‘Then you’ve heard about poor Sicily.’ 

‘I’ave.’ 

His mom nods. She licks her lips and finally manages to pour them both tea. The smell reminds him of lye soap and sneaking out of the house on hot summer nights. 

Everything feels off kilter. He wants to leave but doesn’t want to be rude so forces himself to take a sip. It’s too hot for August. The tea is too hot and the air, kitchen, his clothes all too hot for August. 

‘I can’t think how she’s managing.’ His mom goes on. ‘I offered to bring her a dish but she said she was fine.’ 

‘I’m sure she’s just that. Fine.’ 

‘And you’re fine?’ 

‘Yes, I’m fine.’ 

Her hands clutch the mug. It is pink flowered and once belonged to her mother. His matches and sits, neglected save for the initial sip, before him. He picks up the spoon again.

‘Do you want to see him?’

Downey takes a second sip. It’s acidic, soapy. Gods, they always drank such bad tea when he was a kid. ‘Not particularly.’ 

‘He’s changed you know.’ 

‘I’m sure.’ 

‘He’s not as he was then. Things were going on you didn’t know about. He was under a lot of pressure.’ 

‘I’m sure.’ 

‘You should see him.’ 

Downey takes another sip. His mom trembles. He worries that she is going to cry and then what? What do you do when your mom cries? Hug her, he supposes. Tell her it’s all going to be alright, whatever ‘it’ is, and that he’s fine. She’ll be fine. Magda’s fine. Oft’ forgotten Laurie’s fine. Sicily’ll be fine. Everyone is so godsdamn fine. 

The Downey Family Curse: being fine. 

‘Maybe another time,’ he says. 

‘He has good days and bad ones. Today’s a good day.’ 

‘I see.’ 

‘We don’t know how long-’ She presses a hand to her mouth and looks away. Swallows. Her other palm is flat on the table. Downey looks at it, those bird boned fingers, thin skin, the veins beneath. That dry, overworked skin. She clearly still does all the housework without help. Such stubborn pride this family has, he thinks. She’s killing herself over housework. I‘m sporting a black eye. Dad’ll die without saying a word. Magda wants to run away from her husband but won’t.

‘I have to go.’ 

‘All right.’ She stands and goes to the hall for his coat and hat. 

‘I can manage that,’ he says. He hands her the cold press and takes his coat and hat from the stand. ‘You don’t have to run after me.’ 

‘You’re a lord, now.’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘You always did say you were going to get out of here.’ 

‘Yes.’ 

His hand is on the door. She looks at him with pain. ‘And you did, didn’t you?’ 

‘Yes. Ta’, keep well. Thank you for tea.’ 

He lets her hug him, awkwardly, and dutifully kisses her cheek. Her perfume is the same as it was when he was a boy and then he is through the front door and down the street. What the neighbours must think, an assassin visiting just as your husband is dying. For her sake he hopes his dad hangs on for a while yet. 

  
  


//

  
  


Annabelle Thurough has red hair, like Jacob, but no freckles or pretty eyes so really, she pales in comparison. Downey is sat across from her and speaking, with great determination, about the weather. She seems to be just as keen on the weather as him. 

‘I mean it’s been warmer than usual this summer,’ Downey says. He wears a pained expression behind his wine glass. Annabelle mirrors it. 

‘It has.’ 

‘Usually it isn’t this humid.’ 

‘No, it’s usually not. My hair tells me that this summer has been worse.’ 

‘Oh yes.’ 

‘Yes.’ 

They both sip their wine. The fish course is brought in. Food is excellent as Downey has run out of things to say to her in the presence of their parents and if people cannot speak they can always eat. Feeling Amos’ stern gaze Downey compliments the fish and the soup and the wine (which is dismal, the Guild has better. He will one day afford better) and the table in general. Annabelle’s mother is dutifully grateful and then that topic is done. 

Why does he have to go through this horror? Downey wonders. Why haven’t Sicily or Laure or Magda gone through it? They’re all marriageable age as well. Surely there’s some lacklustre merchantmen dad can pair them off to. 

Jacob will eventually be married.

This thought occurs to Downey as they move from the dining room to the parlour which has been set up for cards. Oh gods, cards. Cards can be fun when played with Ludo for ridiculous stakes but otherwise? He’d rather some other game. Backgammon or Thud, even. 

Jacob will have to go through this horror, too. Be married off to some titled young woman with the proper breeding to carry on the family line and secure whatever advantage it is the family needs. 

To Downey’s pleasure the parents take seats at the card table, by unspoken agreement, leaving Downey and Annabelle to sit awkwardly by the window and ‘get to know each other.’ 

Before dinner Magda, in an attempt to be helpful, supplied Downey with a list of titles of the latest paperbacks that most young women are reading. He tries that route. 

‘Have you read anything by Otranto?’ 

Annabelle nods stiffly. 

‘Any good? I haven’t read them.’ 

‘I couldn’t say.’ 

Downey wrinkles his nose. Really, it is all unfair. He should be ensconced somewhere deeply private with Jacob or back at the Guild figuring out how best to approach his research. Not stuck in a small parlour on a street full of nobodies making painful small-talk with a girl he doesn’t give a toss about. 

Annabelle sighs then tries a subject, ‘have you traveled much? Mother says you attended the assassin’s guild.’ 

‘I fail to see how either are related to each other.’ 

‘I just thought-’ 

‘No I haven’t.’ 

‘Oh.’ 

She looks out the window. He looks out the window. There is the murmur of their parents at cards and the crackle of the fire. 

‘You have sisters?’ She tries again. 

‘Three.’ 

‘Are you much close with them?’ 

‘Yes, not really, no.’ 

‘I’m sorry?’ 

‘I am close with the eldest, not really with the middle, not at all with the youngest.’ 

‘I see.’ 

‘Do you?’ 

She shrugs. Downey returns to looking out the window. It has turned into a rainy night and they watch more their reflections than anything going on in the streets which are mostly empty save a few poor sods running from the pub home or from home to the pub. A watchman stumbles by. A few moments later they hear the customary call of ‘all is well.’ 

Except, Downey thinks, it bloody well isn’t. 

‘Do you have siblings?’ Downey relents. 

‘Two brothers. They’re just children though. They’re upstairs.’ 

‘Are you much close to them?’ 

‘Yes, yes.’ 

He smiles. She mirrors it but neither is gentle. 

‘You don’t want this any more than I do,’ Annabelle whispers. She plucks at dress sleeves. They are cheap muslin and Downey can see where they’ve been reworked to fit her. Perhaps it had been owned by a cousin or a friend of the family. ‘I think we should be honest with one another.’ 

‘No I don’t. No offence. You’re not my type.’ 

‘Nor you mine.’ 

He sneers. Not her type indeed. At least he is handsome, she is plain. 

Annabelle continues, ‘I want to travel.’ 

‘Having a husband helps with that.’ 

‘Having a husband with money.’ 

That smarts but he knows it’s true and only shrugs in response. 

‘I can do better,’ she says. ‘But father is keen on this match for mysterious reasons.’ 

‘Same with mine. They cooked it up at a guild meeting or something.’ He doesn’t add, No you couldn’t do better than me. But he sorely wants to. 

‘Do you think it has something to do with guild politics?’ 

‘Probably.’ 

‘ _ You  _ go to the meetings, surely you know.’ 

He shrugs. She looks disgusted. He snaps, ‘they’re boring. I have better things to do.’ 

‘Oh yes, I’m sure. Swanning about murdering people?’ 

‘ _ Inhuming _ . And yes, as a matter of fact, that is something I could be doing.’ 

She says with some haughtiness, ‘I don’t think I could let an assassin touch me.’

‘We’ve already shook hands.’ 

‘You know what I mean.’ 

‘Your dad sells weapons. He’s technically aiding and abetting.’ 

‘Swords don’t kill people, people kill people.’ 

‘Gods that idiotic line.’ 

She glares. He grins. 

Parents look over and both smile before attention is diverted from them. Downey whispers, ‘well I fail to see this moving forward so we’re both in the clear. Where do you want to travel?’ 

‘Klatch. Genua. Anywhere that isn’t here.’ 

Oh, Downey thinks. That kind of travel. He understands that kind of travel. 

‘I’ve a friend from Klatch,’ he says. ‘If you ever go let me know. He’s nicer than me.’ 

‘That’s doesn’t seem to be a difficult feat.’ 

‘No. My friend is rich, too. Maybe you can marry him.’ The thought amuses. Though, Ludo has a weird taste in women and probably would go for the girl if there was some form of mutual interest. Which there would be, Ludo being rich, nice and handsome. ‘I’ll give a speech at your wedding and take full credit for the match.’ 

‘Is he an assassin too?’ 

‘Oh yes.’ 

‘Then it won’t work.’ 

‘Most rich men have at least attended the guild.’ 

‘But not all took the black.’ 

‘Sure, the lame ones. Don’t marry the lame ones. They’re all scags.’ 

Her face is a picture as she stands with great ceremony and offers to get him a cup of coffee. Returning with a cup for him and one for herself she whispers, ‘you aren’t a gentleman.’ 

‘I will be one day,’ he insists.  

‘Gentlemen don’t say those words in the presence of ladies.’ 

‘I know.’ 

She takes a sip. He wonders if she followed the insult but if she did, she gives no indication of it. 

  
  


Post-midnight moon slinks across the ceiling of his room and Downey watches it with disinterest. Amos had been pleased with the evening’s progress and displayed it by patting Downey on the back saying, ‘this is a fine match.’ 

Downey had frozen at the touch then relaxed then wondered at the sudden warmth in his stomach. Oh yes, parental approval. What a thing. 

‘Well?’ A quiet whisper from a gently opening door. Magda stands in shadows. 

‘It was fine.’ 

She enters and closes the door, sliding to the floor against it. 

‘Do you like her?’ 

‘Gods no. If we married it’d be worse than,’ he indicates below them to their parents’ room. ‘We’d be beastly to each other. Our children would hate us.’ 

‘Dad seemed pleased.’ 

Downey rolls to his side and curls up. ‘Yeah. We both put on a show Miss Thurough and I.’ 

‘What does she look like?’ 

‘Ugly. Red hair, though. Doesn’t that make her a witch?’ 

Magda rolls her eyes. ‘What else can you tell me.’ 

‘She’s a b-’

‘Without insulting her.’ 

A deep sigh of the overly oppressed then Downey says that she likes travel, has read Otranto but it’s unclear if she likes the writer or not, wants to marry rich and their family isn’t cutting it, and hates assassins. 

‘I see,’ Magda’s amusement is evident. 

‘What is with people and not wanting to be touched by an assassin? We don’t carry the plague.’ 

‘People don’t like death or being reminded of their mortality which are two things that can’t be helped when in the presence of an assassin.’ 

‘Yes, yes. As Dog-botherer says, we are of and for the dead. Like mushrooms and mistletoe.’ 

‘You’re a strange one, Will.’ 

‘Beg your pardon sis, I’m perfectly normal. And it’s William.’ 

She stands, rubs the back of her calves then says she is going to bed. He should sleep, it’s late. Busy day tomorrow and so on. 

Once alone Downey returns to staring at the ceiling. He wonders how he is going to escape from this plot of his father’s. Life is escaping his control. He doesn’t want any of it. Rolling over he throws his face into his pillow and doesn’t quasi-drunkenly cry. 

  
  


//

  
  


Vetinari is considering a letter that had belonged to his aunt. He is aware that he does not know how to handle the situation in front of him and is seeking solace from one who has done all of this before, only differently. 

As a young man he had said that love is a contamination that only gets in the way of things. Madam had said that contamination only makes things deeper, it does not disqualify them. In this case, it makes you more complete and human, it allows you to carry more possibilities and goodness. A feeling for someone uncontaminated with affection is hollow.  

He had dismissed her as overly sentimental. He has long thought young Vetinari a bit of an idiot. 

He had found the letter years ago but had forgotten it, mostly. Then, six months ago, it’s ugly truthfulness barged back into his life. This thing they have, him and Downey, is very tender. Very new. He is aware it could dissipate at any moment. He is also, annoyingly, aware why embers show up a lot in love poetry. 

Roberta Meserole had written to Vetinari’s father, Wilbur: 

 

_ I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance […] My enterprise is stranded, washed up on shore a shipwreck and so I emerge from it tragic. I am tragic. _ _   
_ _   
_ _ (Someone tells me: our kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? What standards do you apply to it that will let you render it one way or another? Why is it better to last than to burn? Do not answer that, I am being facetious. I understand the importance of longevity.) _ _   
_ _   
_ __ I write you this, ill advisedly. You are someone I will never be and I am someone you have created in your mind and have put in pretty, purple dresses and situated in drawing rooms. You will be dead one day. We are tragic. Tragedy is when something like love ends in neither defeat nor victory but perfect, utter, disgusting indifference .

 

Vetinari wants to write to Madam, _You were right in all your letters to my father. Every single one of them. I hate that you were right because I am reading them now as the means to find words because for once I don’t have any. I hate that I must learn language again._

Vetinari positions himself in philosophies. He understands himself through the works of Witten and Stein and Placrites. Stein wrote, _ Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly.  _

He is waiting for Downey. He is not waiting for Downey. He is doing work and should Downey show up and agree to hand of cards that would be nice. He is waiting without waiting. 

It is half ten at night and he cannot think anything clearly. He muses, Once we name something we can never see it the same way again and what is unnameable falls away, becomes lost. 

This is, perhaps, why he is suddenly terrified and yet more obsessed with language than usual. It is his only raft. 

Things had been easy, before. When he had only Ankh-Morpork to manage and all personal desire and affections were too much a distraction to be considered. There had been reasons (valid, true, important reasons) for not ever pursuing what had been there in front of him. He had worried about assassination in the early days, also blackmail, then later the power dynamics. Of imposing himself, of using the economics of want to his own end. 

He wonders how Downey sees this. Through what lens does he read whatever it is they are doing, trying to do, fumbling towards with no grace or awareness. He cannot fathom it. Or he can try, but he thinks that makes him too smug when Downey is around which in turn makes Downey churlish and snappy. 

And oh gods, his aunt once wrote about that too. Knowing one’s beloved, as she so sentimentally put it (Vetinari substitutes Beloved for Other Person) causes a contradiction one cannot escape. 

_ One is in love, _ she writes,  _ and believes that one knows the Other Person  _ [Vetinari Substitutes this, he cannot help it, even in thought. Beloved rankles. It is trite, reductive and not useful here since there is noone of that kind] _ better than anyone and one can assert this to the Other Person - Yet!  At the same time, one is aware that one knows absolutely nothing about the Other Person. One cannot decipher them because the Other cannot decipher oneself. _

She had summed it up:  _ I wear myself out, I shall never know.  _

All of this rumination serves no purpose. Vetinari opens up a cupboard in his mind and deposits all thoughts there. He closes it. Returns to the work before him. 

 

When young boys like girls they pull their hair and push them into the mud. 

 

Vetinari considers this then thinks, Well that is what terrible male role models will get you. 

The work cannot keep him and so he retires to a more comfortable chair with a book. It is gone eleven. Downey had said he was free. Half ten was their usual time. Vetinari reads the book with great diligence. 

Finally, a window opens, the air in the room shifts. 

‘I was beginning to think you weren’t going to make it,’ Vetinari says. He continues reading with great diligence. Downey huffs. He can hear but not yet see the man. ‘Have you read Nelson’s latest?’ 

‘That’s the philosophical memoir one?’ Downey materializes in shirt sleeves with two drinks in hand. He passes one over. 

‘Yes. I find it a horrifyingly fascinating insight into her mind.’ 

‘Quite. You know, not really my thing.’ 

‘I thought you preferred non-fiction.’ 

‘Not that kind. Gods let me see,’ Downey seats himself and pulls the book from Vetinari’s hands. “To align oneself with the real while intimating that others are at play, approximate, or in imitation can feel good. But any fixed claim on realness, especially when it is tied to an identity, also has a finger in psychosis. If a man who thinks he is a king is mad, a king who thinks he is a king is no less so.” Yes, not quite my thing. Does it apply to patricians?’ A cheeky grin. Vetinari takes the book back and primly says that Downey has missed the point. 

‘Which is? I’m in the mood to hear you witter on about these things.’ 

Vetinari doesn’t know how he feels about that. Downey’s black eye is less swollen than it was twelve hours ago but still glints ugly and crass in candle light. 

‘She is discussing what “feeling real” means to her. The notion of “aliveness.” Nelson says that aliveness is not a reaction to external stimuli, nor is it an identity, but rather a sensation that, among other things, makes one want to live.’ 

‘Uh huh, and what’s that bit about identity being rooted in psychosis? I don’t believe I agree with that.’ 

‘She is speaking to identity and how people tie it down to certain things they fix in their minds as real when other experiences can radically alienate you from your own body therefore self which of course begs the question - if you have been alienated from self what, then, is real? Your physical body remains real, an idea of “you” remains present,  and so “realness” must be tied to something other than identity. Identity is an unfixed mark that can made and unmade. Some people find pleasure in aligning themselves with an identity but there can also be horror in it, not to mention an impossibility. We are not always soaking in one sense of self. The mind cannot live in stasis for twenty-four hours a day. Everything is in flux.’  

‘And this is what you read for pleasure at eleven at night after a day of work?’ 

Vetinari inclines his head. Downey stares at him for a long moment then snorts. Mutters that he ought not to be surprised. Vetinari suddenly wants to move. He watches as Downey picks up the book again and thumbs through it. 

This entire thing is a mistake, he thinks. We’re too radically different. 

Downey pauses on a page and reads it. He says, ‘this is all right. “What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted? Can it be that words comprise one of the few economies left on earth in which abundance-surfeit, even-comes at no cost?” I like that. That nothing is lost when words are wasted.’ 

Vetinari reconsiders his previous thought. 

‘Anyway,’ Downey sighs. ‘How are you?’ 

‘I am well. As you see,’ he motions his hand to indicate the space, the room, the book, the drink. Everything. Downey thin-lipped smiles. ‘And you?’ 

‘Oh I’m fine. My face has been prettier.’ 

‘Did the Watch find anything?’ Vetinari has already been briefed by Vimes who grumbled about assassins and their wiley, untrustworthy ways. 

‘No, because there was nothing to find as I told the Commander multiple times. Whatever you see in that man I do not understand.’ 

‘Yes, as you’ve expressed to me multiple times. He is capable, reliable, honest,’ Vetinari is ticking off on his fingers. ‘Thorough, pedantic, obsessive, just the right amount of paranoid. Shall I continue?’ 

‘What praises you sing.’ 

Vetinari smirks, stands, offers another drink which is accepted with a silent handing over the glass. Vimes had said that the guild was spotless which he did not trust. Vetinari had replied that the assassin’s guild did have a very good cleaning staff. Vimes had not been pleased. Vetinari had been amused. Vimes had stomped off and all in all Vetinari expects results by the end of the week. 

But: language. There is a surfeit of words in the world. He uses many of them. Does he witter on, as Downey would have it? 

He knows he does. He doesn’t like having it called ‘wittering’ though. 

‘What are we doing?’ Downey asks from the chair. Vetinari takes up the glasses and walks back over. 

‘Having drinks and  _ wittering _ .’ 

Downey grins at him. Vetinari will admit that the man has a very nice jawline. One of those jawlines that people kill for and he knows that the traditionally handsome face fools most people.     
  
  


Memory: 

A party somewhere. Someone’s flat. He can’t remember whose. It’s the first time he has spoken to Downey outside of a classroom, in a meaningful way, ever. They are both twenty-three, twenty-four. The party is full of writers, artists, assassins, actors, actresses, the up and coming, the down and out. 

Vetinari, very much a twenty-something, thinking: Why is Downey here? He’s such a  _ lad _ .

Downey, also very much a twenty-something, a very drunk twenty-something, says: Dog-botherer! Come here! I have to tell you about fungi. I’m doing an experiment. What are your views on fungi? 

He hadn’t really had any at the time. Downey then proceeded to lecture him about mushrooms for two hours. Now he does. Now he has  _ many  _ views about fungi. 

Afterwards, as Downey went to find drunk food with Ludo, Vetinari had thought, Oh so that’s why he was invited. He’s a fucking  _ weirdo _ . Behind that symmetrical face and jawline is a mad botanist who clearly should be kept away from everyone’s food supply.    
  
  


Present: 

‘I mean this,’ Downey motions to the space between them. ‘What is this? I know you might prefer something nebulous but can we at least define it a bit more than whatever vague term it was you used six months ago?’ 

‘Very well, what would you define it as?’ 

‘Are we...how do the kids say it? Seeing each other? Or was that just an idea that’s floated off now?’ 

‘You said when we first started this six months ago that there wasn’t a mathematical formula for how these things turn out.’ 

Downey agrees. There isn’t. But this is where Vetinari’s expertise should come in handy. Vetinari isn’t so sure about this. This is _ precisely  _ an area in which he has no expertise. 

Vetinari, ‘I find I enjoy spending time with you.’ 

‘Right.’ 

Vetinari waits. Downey sighs. He says, ‘is this just a, uh, friendship (for lack of a better word) thing? Is this going to be a casual affair? Or do you want something else? I want to make sure my expectations are reasonable.’  

Vetinari thinks, I have no idea. It’s been seventeen years since I’ve had anything more than a passing flirtation with someone. He can feel his back pressed firmly into the chair. How his body is positioned exactly. Oh right, this is nervousness. Out loud he says that he likes things how they are, how they have been, how they seem to be going and is content to see what develops from here. Downey says, ‘can we try developing things in another room?’ And Vetinari thinks,  _ Oh _ that’s what he was getting at. Maybe? Impossible to know. 

‘Yes that’s fine.’ 

‘Good.’ 

  
  


They take a deviated way to Vetinari’s bedroom that involves more secret passages than strictly necessary but assassins are hard people to disorient. They come with an internal compass and he knows Downey has three in his head plus a map and a strong understanding of  _ exactly _ where he is at most times. Physically, that is. Vetinari suspects Downey doesn’t know where he is metaphorically a lot of the time. 

Or maybe he does. He isn’t in the man’s head, after all. What a strange and overly nature-filled space  _ that _ would be. 

Downey mutters a curse as he trips on a loosened tile. 

‘Apologies,’ Vetinari says. ‘I don’t have the floors redone often. The humidity loosens tiles at an unreasonable rate.’ 

‘Get wood next time.’ 

‘Indeed.’ Vetinari pushes open a panel and steps through to his room with Downey following brushing dust from clothes. His face is wrinkled in mild disgust and Vetinari cannot help but feel amused. Poor Downey, being dragged through dust and cobwebs in his nice, expensive clothes. 

‘What?’ Downey asks with a face. 

‘Nothing.’ 

‘There has got to be a more efficient way to get to your room. We haven’t gone that far.’ 

Vetinari does not reply. 

‘You’re about three rooms hubward from the Oblong Office. It should take all of four minutes, tops. What was that labyrinth we just did for?’ 

Vetinari continues to not reply. Downey huffs.

‘Fine, fine,’ Downey continues. ‘Keep your secrets. Glad to see your aesthetic hasn’t changed since Guild days.’ 

‘I beg your pardon, Downey. It has.’ 

‘Oh yes, no poster of that one book series you liked.’ 

‘I have matured, after all.’ 

Downey mutters something. Vetinari does not ask for clarification. This is the awkward between moments and Vetinari thinks it should be Downey who makes a decision at this point. Really, Vetinari thinks, I would appreciate it if he at least starts. The power dynamic make things a tad wahoonie shaped if he ponders it too much. 

Downey, however, seems interested in inspecting his book selection on the bedside table. 

‘I never put you down as a Sue Lifton reader,’ Downey says. 

‘I read widely of most genres on most subjects.’ 

‘My mother reads Sue Lifton books.’ 

‘Your mother has excellent taste in murder mysteries, then.’ 

Downey, apparently satisfied with his perusal of the books and the unfinished crossword and the sparse wall hangings (one etching of Ankh-Morpork from 1605 and one painting of a still life) says, ‘well?’ 

‘Well?’ Vetinari replies hoping it will annoy Downey into action. It works. 

As expected, Downey tastes like whiskey. His hands, though, aren’t as soft as Vetinari had anticipated for a man who dislikes dirtying them. 

Oh yes, the gardening. All that botany and tendency to inhume people with increasingly, outlandishly exotic plants. 

Downey’s hands go from his face to hips, pulling Vetinari against him and Vetinari can feel Downey hard, those hands groping over his arse, wandering up his back then around to chest. 

‘How do you want this?’ Downey asks against Vetinari’s mouth. 

What a question. Vetinari thinks he wants it all ways at once. He thinks Downey has a very nice jawline and shoulders and black eyes and too-charming smile. Downey, after all, is a man who will smile through your murder and give a beautiful speech at your funeral. Vetinari thinks that he wants Downey bent over the edge of the bed, naked or on his knees in front of him, or Downey on top of him and between his legs. 

Life is full of unexpected things. Vetinari enjoys expecting the unexpected. He had not expected that question. Or Downey waiting for an answer. Or a need to have an answer. 

He says something vague but definite enough to indicate: yes I want this and maybe you should take some clothes off it’s a filthy hot summer night. 

Downey snorts, steps back and starts to unbutton his waistcoat. Hidden knives are like moon light slivers across wooden floors in how they glint. Downey is a ridiculously well armoured man. Vetinari had been able to feel the outlines of them through satin and black brocade. 

The night is warm and the room quiet but for the whispers of fabric being folded. All those intimate sounds of two people undressing then coming together and being awkward but not wishing to dwell on it. 

For Vetinari, he is surprised his leg is still holding up as he pulls Downey’s hips to him and Downey grabs a pillow to press his face into muffling words that sound like repetitions of ‘fuck’ and ‘gods’ and ‘yesyes.’ Downey’s legs spread eagerly and Vetinari hopes, as he fucks into the other man, that his leg will continue to hold up and, importantly, not begin its twinging that it does upon occasion which makes any thought of sex non-existent. It would be deeply embarrassing. He’d rather not have that happen with Downey of all people. 

Downey is tight, and his fingers winding into the sheets is a pleasant sight.

Here Vetinari’s mind splits, one side thinking about the nature of Ankh-Morpork and how the city has changed over the last seventeen years. It remains the city of his childhood yet is inherently different. He wanders through streets, sees them as they were under Winder, Snapcase, himself. 

The other part of his mind is trying to not come because gods it has been a while and Downey is making filthy sounds and everything about what they are doing is lewd and disgusting and glorious and wonderful. 

During Snapcase’s time there had always been hanged bodies from lampposts. Assassins, usually. Sometimes thieves or those deemed dangerous to the patrician. Vetinari certainly takes care of those who threaten the stability of his city-state but usually with more tact and discretion. Snapcase liked to have people pulled apart in a public forum. Vetinari disappears them. 

Now Downey is touching himself in a distracted manner and Vetinari cannot ignore the sound of their bodies moving against each other. Downey’s hand moves from himself to Vetinari’s hips, yanking him against him with a growl of ‘harder’ and Vetinari’s fingers are digging into Downey’s hips firm enough to leave marks and oh gods he wants to come. 

Downey groans, Vetinari feels him tighten, his shoulder blades shift with arching back and Vetinari follows suit with muffled moan into Downey’s neck. They slump awkwardly into sheets. Downey makes a noise of complaint. 

‘Wet,’ he grumbles as he rolls both of them to the side. ‘And oh gods I’m going to be sore tomorrow.’ 

Vetinari frowns, still pressed against Downey’s back. 

‘Worth it, though.’ 

Ah, that’s a better response. 

Downey shifts so they’re facing each other and looks both arrogantly pleased and shy. It is a combination that does not seem to work well with his face. Vetinari says, ‘your expression is not attractive, Downey.’ 

‘Ever the romantic.’ Downey kisses him. ‘We should clean up.’ 

Vetinari sits up and sees the pile of their clothes by the secret door. Downey stretches and does not seem inclined to move. 

‘It’s late,’ Vetinari says.

‘Yes. My fault, I had things to do.’ 

‘How is your eye?’ 

‘Beautiful, as you see.’ He motions to his face. Vetinari gives him a look. 

This is not entirely an unpleasant situation, quite the opposite and better than Vetinari had expected so he decides that Downey can remain for a while, if he wants. 

‘I have work but you may stay if you would like.’ 

Downey grins and proceeds to roll himself up in the sheets as Vetinari disappears into the bathroom. Reappearing in clean clothes Vetinari finds Downey reading the Sue Lifton book from the top of the bedside table pile. 

‘This is terrible,’ Downey says, still grinning. 

‘It’s a guilty pleasure.’ 

'Excellent.' 

‘There are clean towels in the cupboard on the wall.’

‘She’s going to Genua to find her lost sister and will solve murder on the way. What is not to love?’ 

‘You will need to procure a toothbrush in the future. I do not have a spare.’ 

‘Oh gods,’ he is flipping through the pages. ‘She has a casino shoot out on a river boat? I’m excited for this book. I’m borrowing it, by the by.’ 

‘So long as it is returned in one piece and unburnt.’ 

Downey rolls his eyes before scooting to the bathroom muttering that Vetinari can keep a grudge longer than necessary. Vetinari refrains from pointing out that it was an exceedingly rare book and that Downey was being an ass when he burnt it. 

‘What was it?’ Downey asks from the bathroom. ‘That book you were reading.’ 

‘Histories of the accountants of Ankh-Morpork.’ 

Vetinari turns in his desk chair to see Downey leaning against the door frame of the bathroom, wash cloth in hand with a disbelieving look. 

‘Actually?’ 

He doesn’t answer, only gives a sliver of a smile before returning to the papers before him. Downey huffs and returns to the bathroom. 

The night passes gently.

 

//


	8. Chapter 8

It’s several weeks before Downey can wrangle enough courage to arrange a time to see Jacob. Amos insists he attend all Merchant Guild meetings and watches him with careful eye which therefore clogs up almost all evenings. Then there is the lecture about appropriate clothing for one’s occupation.

Amos, ‘We are not Assassins we do not wear black. We are not lords and so must follow the sartorial laws of our class.’

Downey wants to beat up the sartorial laws. Who the fuck said that certain classes can’t wear certain furs or own more than one pair of gloves? Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?

‘The kings of old,’ Amos replies dryly.

Downey complains loudly about it until Amos’ face says that he has had enough of his son’s whining.

Deciding that while his dad might not be an assassin he, William Downey, has taken the black he slides into breakfast half in uniform, half in civvies. His mom looks at him with her quiet eyes and says, ‘I think you look better in blue. It’s a cheerful colour.’ Downey takes the hint and slinks back upstairs and changes. Sicily gloats, he accidentally spills coffee on her shift. They argue until Amos arrives then go quiet.

‘Don’t antagonize your sister.’

Downey dutifully nods.

‘It demonstrates a lack of self-restraint and a selfish disdain for others.’

Downey nods again.

‘I will have no son of mine exhibiting such behaviour.’

Downey mumbles an apology and breakfast is finished in silence.

  
  


Dreaming Downey is haunted by the thought of millipedes nesting in his pillow and moss growing on the back of his neck. His home is a tree, hardwood with a balsa heart, and it’s being devoured by fungi. One of those infectious kinds trees cannot warn each other about.

(He excels in stealth class because he knows how to walk on wooden floors without making a sound. It’s all about pressure points.)

Family keeps you safe. His lost milk teeth are kept in soft pouches for good luck by his mom. Blood ties defend against the storms of life. Who else is going to take you in when you fall face first somewhere due to bad decisions? Downey learns to be diligent in his duties. He does not shirk work to galavant with old friends and no longer paints rude words on the side of buildings. Amos is Balsa wood. _Ochroma_ , being a pioneer plant, establishes itself in clearings where there are no other plants so Amos establishes business ties, familial blood links where there are none.

Downey has seen the list for the family: Miss Annabelle Thurough for him, a Mr James Wiltshire for Magda, a Mr Thomas Kaide for Laure, and a Mr John Carter for Sicily. Their family worth is written out beside each name. Downey knows how much he is worth, now. He wonders if it is the same as what someone would pay to inhume him. Life is cheap in Ankh-Morpork, death on the other hand--

‘I think he wanted me to see it,’ Downey says to Magda one night. ‘I think he wants us to know how many hundreds of dollars we’re worth. Debit credit columns, the man would bleed them were I to cut him.’

‘He’s doing what is best for us, Will. This is the only way he knows. He does love us.’   
  


 

The Thuroughs come to dinner one night and Downey wants to jump into the Ankh and swim away. It is the usual painful experience Downey has come to expect when being forced to spend time with Annabelle. The next day Annabelle writes to him, clearly instructed to by her mother. Downey writes back, clearly instructed to by his father.

Looking over the letter before it is posted Amos underlines words, ‘you’ve spelled these ones wrong, Will. Write them out ten times and don’t say a word to me about your education being worth the money I spent on it.’

‘Words are hard,’ Downey mutters.

Amos stares at him, pushes the letter over, ‘Write them out correctly then rewrite the letter. You clearly don’t work hard enough. I always worried that the Assassins Guild would spoil you.’

Despite words playing silly buggers Downey has a beautiful hand and does as he is instructed all the while making a list in his head of all the ways he could inhume everyone around him at this, precise moment. Why does ‘island’ have an S in it? He had tried to write something nice about foreign places, it being the only safe topic between him and Annabelle and this is what niceness gets him. Bugger all that for a lark.   
  


Amos is a particular shade of burgundy. Downey cannot tell his dad this, that his name is a particular shade of Burgundy. Too many colours. He also cannot tell his dad that some words just don’t spell correctly in his head and he always had Ludo proofread everything he ever wrote. Some things come naturally, others not so much. Amos wouldn’t understand.

Ludo is soft blue. Jacob yellow-green. There are names for the colours but he’s never bothered to learn them. Magda a steel-blue. Laure Ankh-river green. Sicily gold. William is rich black, Will dull brown-rust-red of dirty brick. Numbers map themselves in a particular way but it works well and makes him good at maths so not as much of a hinderance. And it’s not the colours fault he’s bad at words, no he likes them well enough. It’s the word’s fault.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, he thinks. It is what it is. You just have to make do.

  


/

  


What a season for all of this. Brother-in-law dead, father dying. At least one thing seems to have resolved itself for the moment, that is Vetinari and their togetherness. That makes him smile, that makes him aroused, that makes him not-as-stressed about everything else going on which is too much. He smelled like him in the morning. He hasn’t smelled like someone else in a long while.

All Downey wants to do this day is craft lesson plans and fill out inhumation paperwork, not dwell on that which is most closely aligned to his profession.

  


‘I didn’t expect you,’ Sicily says awkwardly. She wears her mourning dress with deep resentment. Downey sneers as he steps into the front hall.

‘Thought I’d tidy up a matter.’

She takes a step back, small, defensive, she wants her back against a wall. He wants to say that if he were here to inhume her he wouldn’t make small talk first.

‘What matter is that?’

‘The falsifying evidence matter. The commander is a deeply unpleasant man and I dislike having him in my life any more than is necessary.’

‘I can see that.’

‘The unpleasant bit or me not wanting him around?’

‘Both.’

They have not moved from the front hall. Does Sicily have no manners? No class? At the very least he should be invited to take a seat somewhere. Not that he would. But he should be invited so he can turn her down.

‘Yes. To that effect, I don’t appreciate you leaving scraps of guild letterhead beneath corpses. Clumsy. Poorly executed.’ Humourless smile at the bad joke. Sicily rolls her eyes. ‘Leave me and mine out of your paltry affairs.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘Good lord, of course it’s a threat. I’m an assassin. I make threats.’

Sicily folds her arms and glares. It is like being smacked how much it reminds him of their childhood. Both standing in a hallway arguing over idiotic things. He rolls his shoulders in a shrug. She snaps that if he has nothing else to say he can go.

‘So did you do it?’ Downey asks.

‘No.’

‘Did you hire someone to do it?’

‘You’d be aware had I inhumed my dearly beloved.’ She plucks her sleeves, ‘I’ve never forgiven you, you know.’

‘For what?’

‘It’s your fault I had to marry him.’

Downey shrugs. He says he doesn’t really care either way about whether or not she forgives him. Anyway, it’s dad’s fault, really, when you get down to it. Sicily says, ‘of course you don’t care. You’re a man. Being forced to marry someone you dislike is different on your end.’

‘True.’

‘Do you want to know what it was like being married to him?’

‘No.’

‘I’ll tell you anyway.’

‘I’ll pass.’

He turns to the door, he can hear her talking and has no desire to hear what living with someone you cannot tolerate would be like. He has had enough experience with their family, though he owns, it’s different with a husband. That whole marriage bed issue. He pushes the thought down and away as he opens the door.

‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ he says as Sicily continues to speak. He thinks her very dogged. Very persistent. Maybe she should take up writing, he has heard that helps with emotional problems. ‘Ta.’

He slams the door as her fist connects with it muting her scream.

  
  


Retreat to bees and mushrooms. The hive in the back gardens is humming. Though Downey does nothing regarding to its tending to, leaving that for others to maintain, there is pleasure in watching the furry bodies move to their unmammalian order.

There are mushrooms above ground here; living their quick formed lives. Then those below, in the cool basements of the guild. Fungi spores cover everything from hair to clothes - they are breathed in, rest in lungs, digested and deposited.

Being nitrate dependent creatures they favour dead bodies. A patch in the gardens is greener than the others and there are mushrooms around the edge circling. A few other plants grow and he stands admiring them for a quiet moment as honey bees, whose honey he has no desire to ever consume, loiter.

Is it a form of diluted cannibalism to eat honey made from bees that have feasted upon the pollen of flowers growing from the detritus of a dead human?

‘I should probably get another hobby,’ he mutters.

His greenhouse, where the black bougainvilleas and other experiments are kept, is one of the few private spaces allowed in a guild filled with students and staff and teachers and assassins passing through.

The orchids require tending to first so he minds their delicate needs before turning to the mistletoe. This is his favourite murder weapon come Hogswatch because nothing says ‘fuck you’ like inhuming a terrible spouse on behalf of the other with mistletoe. Several berries, or rather drupes, are ready so he clips them and sets aside for drying and powdering. The entire plant is poisonous and leeches life out of trees. A parasitic horror. He adores it.

Sicily murdered John Carter of this is Downey is certain. A head wound is what the Commander told Vetinari, so perhaps she hit him? Or pushed him and he hit his head. He thinks that he should see the body in order to determine exact cause of death. He doesn’t think the Watch very proficient in such matters.

Where do the Watch keep bodies? Watch house, in a cellar or some cool place. Damn, he thinks, I should have asked Sicily if she had the body back for funeral arrangements.

The nightshade needs watering as does the oleander. The water hemlock is soupy in its habitat and he trims the unhealthy bits. The small, clustered, yellow-white flowers are in bloom

He thinks that once he retires he will have a beautiful garden full of lovely dangerous things. He hums tendrils of a swing piece he heard the other day as he tends to the remaining plants.

  
  


Honestly, Downey is shocked by how easy it is to break into the Watch basement where bodies are kept for a time before being returned to their families.

Carter’s is beneath the expected sheet and Downey only has to peel down the cover to the man’s chest to see what most likely did him in. A large blow to the side of the head is evident. He angles a candle and tries to see what could have made the wound.

Something blunt, he thinks. A bat? No, the curvature of the wound is wrong. Pulling out a knife he carefully lifts the matted hair for a better look but it reveals nothing more useful. He moves on to the hands. Finely manicured, soft. He finds one chipped nail and thinks that interesting given the clear care Carter took in his appearance. Beyond the chipped nail there is no sign of anything amiss. No evidence of a struggle which means either Carter knew the person or it was a surprise.

Without opening the body there isn’t much else to go on and while there are no outward signs of poison that doesn’t mean there isn’t any in his system.

Well, Downey thinks, this was only marginally worth breaking in for. Tidying up he catches sight of a selection of evidence vials and investigates. One is skin, probably whatever was caught beneath the victim’s nails, and another is blue fiber. Downey pockets it as he hears boots on stairs.

Snuffing out the candle he is up and out of the room just as the door opens.

  


/

  


It’s a Thursday night, late past eleven, when Downey sneaks out of his room and traverses across rooftops to the Wallflower finding Jacob at a table both shy and excited. Downey slides into a chair with a cheeky smile.

‘I thought we’d see each other sooner,’ Jacob says.

‘Yeah, me too. Life is trouble, that’s my new motto.’

Jacob grins as wine is brought over. ‘I thought it was, “do whatever the fuck you want, just don’t get fucking caught you scag”?’

‘I need to find a better way to say that.’

‘Preferably with fewer swears.’

‘That is part of my charm.’ Downey snaps his fingers and points at Jacob’s dubious expression.

‘So, how are things with you? How goes the courtship?’

Downey wants to drink the entire bottle of wine to himself  then maybe he’ll be ready to talk about it. Instead he sips and shrugs.

‘It’s fine, it goes,’ he sighs. ‘We both hate each other and so you know, it’ll be a travesty of a marriage.’

‘Ha! Assuming it gets there. Three weeks until classes start back up so that’ll put some distance between you and those dread familial obligations.’

Yes, Downey thinks, _About that_. But he doesn’t want to tell Jacob that the likelihood of his returning to the Guild is very low at the moment so smiles cheerfully instead.

‘How about you?’ Downey asks. ‘How goes lessons in your Lord Father’s study?’

‘Fine,’ Jacob heaves a sigh. ‘Fine. Fine. Fine. Oh gods I’m so bored William, I want to run away.’ A sudden movement, he grabs Downey’s hand then releases. ‘Let’s run away together. Go somewhere foreign and exciting.’

‘Sto Helit.’

‘Genua.’

‘Klatch.’

‘Counterweight continent.’

‘The Hub.’

Downey laughs around a sip of wine. He wants so badly for this to happen but knows wish-making better than he had three months ago.

‘But really,’ Jacob says refilling their glasses. ‘Father is fine. He is pleased that I will be returning. It keeps me out from underfoot as he brings home whoever his latest mistress is.’

‘Is it a mistress if you only sleep with them once?’ Downey asks philosophically.

‘To father it is. De l’Enfers don’t have _bits of skirt._ ’

‘Your mother is evidently a woman of extraordinary patience.’

‘She smells like a gin distillery on good days.’

‘Ah.’ Downey wants to retreat from this. Fuck, he thinks, I always do this. I always bring up shit topics. ‘That’s rough.’

‘Eh, I’m used to it.’

‘Still.’ Downey wants to say, I’m used to dad but that doesn’t make him an easy person to share space with. ‘That isn’t ideal.’

‘No,’ Jacob is rueful. ‘It isn’t ideal.’

Downey takes a deep drink of wine as Jacob looks at him. He seems to be saying something with his expression but Downey isn’t confident enough to parse it so decides he needs more wine. Maybe he should ask? But isn’t that rude? Excuse me, Jacob, tell me what your face means because I haven’t learned yet how to read you but I want to. Tell me, tell me, tell me.

Seems grasping. Desperate.

And oh gods he wants Jacob to continue liking him but also wants to be cool and detached. He is a ‘chill’ lad who won’t go and get a moving box and shack up with you in the first six months. He isn’t clingy or too attached.

Finding that balance between ‘I am interested’ and ‘I am also a chill person who is able to be casual about everything and doesn’t need to know where we are going at all times oh sweet gods I can do casual sex of course I can I am chill. I am so godsdamn chill’ is difficult. To say the least.

Jacob asks if he wants to eat. Downey says, ‘up to you.’ Now he is over thinking things. Again. This always happens.

‘Come on, William, give me something.’

‘Fine, fine, yes. Let’s eat. What do you want?’

‘Oysters.’

Downey agrees and soon enough they’re trying to be dainty while slurping the molluscs. Downey is enthusiastic in his use of horseradish and wonders if he should kiss Jacob after this. Well, they’ve both had the hot sauce and horseradish and lemon and garlic and wine so it should be fine.

Maybe he should order a gin. Cleanse the pallet.

Jacob is smiling charmingly at him over the oysters. Downey smiles back. He is sure is looks like an idiot.

‘What are you doing tomorrow?’ Jacob asks.

‘Work with dad. Something or other about cambric and silk.’

‘And after?’

‘Guild meeting till gone seven then home for supper then I can probably sneak out again.’

‘I miss seeing you during the day. You know, what is your hair colour in sunlight? A great mystery.’

‘Moon-tanned assassins, Jacob. It’s part of our lifestyle. But I know, I know.’

‘Thank gods we’re back at the guild soon.’

Yeah, Downey thinks morosely, thank gods.

Finishing a second bottle of wine they teeter out to the streets and hold hands in shadows where no one can see them in order to messily makeout in an alley until both become uncomfortable with the current state of affairs but have no way of reconciling it.

Downey’s hand, flat on Jacob’s chest, a brand. ‘We should go home,’ he breathes.

‘I can’t go to yours.’

‘ _Separate_ homes.’

Jacob covers Downey’s hand with his own and says that in another lifetime, things would be different. Downey replies that he hasn’t given up on this lifetime yet.

Jacob cups his face, ‘you’re a hell of a fighter.’

‘Nah, I just want to outlive everyone so I can piss on their graves. I win if I outlive them.’

‘You really know how to ruin a moment.’

Downey smiles, kisses Jacob before pulling away. ‘Not here for moments, I’m here for grave pissing. I’m an absolute tosser haven’t you heard? But no, I know what you mean.’  Awkwardly he returns the cheek cupping because it seems to be Jacob’s thing. He feels lost when showing affection beyond the carnal but knows he needs to learn because this is something Jacob wants.

Jacob presses their noses together while saying they need to see each other more often. Downey whispers an agreement. They part. Fingers touching till they aren’t any more.

  
  


The streets of Ankh-Morpork are summer sweaty. The air cloys. Downey skirts along streets, alleys, up and down closes. He is thinking about the future, how to get to the guild dad’s views be-damned. He is wondering if he wrote to Dr. Tindel, perhaps something could be worked out.

‘I saw you.’

Downey freezes. Sicily loiters by a darkened shop door. The overhang covers her from the limited moonlight filtering down to them.

‘What?’

Sicily walks forward with a vicious smile, ‘I saw you. With that other boy doing _disgusting_ and unnatural things. It was _revolting_.’

‘No one made you watch,’ Downey muttered.

‘What would dad say, I wonder?’

Movement in shadows and Sicily is up against a wall with a knife at her throat. Downey hisses, ‘you tell him, I’ll rip you to shreds.’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘I’ve inhumed more important, and more interesting people than you, sis.’

Sicily tries to swallow but can’t for the grip. Downey stares at her sudden fear and her body’s stupid reaction to it (urination, clutching at his fingers instead of going for his eyes) and remembers that this is his baby sister.

He relents. Steps back. Her feet touch cobbles and she remains frozen by the wall.

‘Tell dad,’ he says pocketing the knife. ‘And you know what will happen.’

Her face doesn’t take long to shift from fear to anger and Downey remembers, very quickly, why he hates her so much. Her ugly pug face and her desire to make his life difficult.

Hellish, in this case. Particularly hellish.

‘Go home,’ Downey sneers. ‘Wash your clothes. You’ll smell worse once it dries.’

Sicily trembles then runs off down the street.

 

 

//


	9. Chapter 9

That horrible truth of a matter: some things are cyclical. Vetinari ponders the repetitious nature of history and wonders if it isn’t a sort of madness. What is that trite line he has heard before? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a form of madness.

That makes time, history, humans mad, mad, mad.

Which, he supposes, isn’t that far from something like the truth.

Ah, that other sticky demon. Truth. What is truth? Made up, mostly. A settled upon group of facts that everyone has agreed to subscribe to. Sometimes other facts rear their contradictory head and the water becomes muddy. Brackish. Society cannot thrive in brackish water. It is not mangrove.

When people think of assassinations they think of the death of an early Ankh-Morkporkian king Rasaec. Little is known about him other than the fact that he was a tyrant and clearly unworthy of the crown that sat upon his head. He was stabbed sixty times and died beneath the statue of his grandfather.

Or, wait, Rasaec was a bastard. A pretender to the throne who went mad with power and had to be eliminated by the One True King and so was stabbed sixty times and died on the steps of a palace that no longer exists.

Or how about the Rasaec that was an evil uncle, killed his nephews, assumed the throne, then was stabbed sixty times by a relative who wanted the crown for himself.

Vetinari marvels that in all the variations of this, the theatrics of sixty stab wounds remains the same.

As does the civil war Rasaec’s death precipitated.

Vetinari wonders, were he to be assassinated, would someone hold up his bloody body and finger the wounds crying out for the dogs of war to be let loose.

Probably not. There’s nothing romantic about the assassination of patricians.

Still, he wouldn’t be alone were he to be assassinated. No assassination is a singular event. They map onto each other. Every hypothetical knife being driven into his hypothetical dying body mirrors those that went into Snapcase, his heart eventually stopping mirroring that of Windor and so on and so forth.

When a man is mutilated and bleeds out in an office he is not alone. His assassin is not alone. There are millions of both in that moment. The community of assassination.   _Sic semper --_  
  
The patrician is dead. Long live the patrician.

 

Vetinari is partway through the daily crossword when Drumknott knocks.

'Yes?'

Drumknott, 'Commander Vimes is here, your lordship.'

'Is he?'

'Yes, he seems terribly upset.'

'Does he?' 

 

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Very well, send him in.’

Vimes, as Vetinari fully expected, is his usual whirlwind self. He stomps in, stands at attention, smells of cigars and humidity. Distemper rolls off him in waves.

‘Ah, Vimes.’ Vetinari smiles blandly up at the other man.

‘Sir.’ Vimes shifts. Vetinari waits. ‘Sir, someone broke into the Watch house last night.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes, sir, and stole some evidence.’

‘My.’

Vimes’ face twitches. Vetinari’s smile brightens. He shuffles papers.

‘Permission to arrest the master of the Assassins’ guild, sir.’

‘On what evidence?’

‘No one else has any interest in the body of John Carter.’

‘That you know of.’

Vimes sighs, a long familiar sound.

‘Sir.’

‘How goes the case beyond the unfortunate disappearance of evidence?’

‘Mr. Carter died by blunt force trauma to the side of his head, sir.’

‘Yes,’ Vetinari steeples his fingers and sits back. ‘I am aware.’

‘Guild paper beneath his body.’

‘Indeed.’

‘The missing evidence is blue fiber found beneath his fingernails.’

‘And I assume you believe it to link to the murderer?’

Vimes makes a face, ‘oh that’d be too easy, sir. It’s most likely unrelated but this is still my crime scene and I will not have it tampered with.’

‘Quite right, Commander. What else have you?’

‘Mrs. Carter wasn’t home. She was out with friends and has five people vouching for her alibi.’ A particularly grudging expression crosses over Vimes’ face and Vetinari does admire the man’s remarkable level of expression for someone who wears the nickname Stoneface with such accuracy. ‘Downey also has an alibi. Vouched for by twenty students.’

‘Quite the conundrum you have.’

‘Sir.’

‘Lady Sybil and I had tea last week.’

Vimes’ expression becomes particularly pained.

‘She tells me that she intends your son to go into the Guild. For at least the classical education portion of it. She seemed disinclined for him to take the black.’

‘Sir.’

‘And of course you own the deed to the land that the guild rests on, but the guild board are the ones who decide entrances. I can see this being an interesting situation for all involved.’

Vimes appears to be a man who wishes to disappear himself into the floor. Vetinari, in a fleeting moment of pity, relents.

‘So, commander, where are you in this investigation? A dead end?’

‘Nosir.’

‘Excellent! I am glad to hear it. Perseverance, Commander.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Anything else?’

‘So...I don’t have permission to arrest Lord Downey?’

Vetinari picks up some papers and turns his attention to them, ‘you are allowed to do as you see fit, Commander. After all, Sir Samuel, you are the Duke of Ankh and Commander of the City Watch.’

Vimes continues to appear to wish to disappear. Vetinari looks up from the papers.

‘Don’t let me detain you, Commander.’

Vimes half-bows then stalks out of the room. Vetinari waits until the door closes completely and he hears Vimes’ stomp down the hall and eventually out of the palace before he sits back with a sigh. Downey, he thinks, you really cannot do things in half, can you?

 

/

 

Oppressive heat of the summer adds to the oppressive tension of the house. Downey and Sicily are on eggshells around each other with one snipping ‘I’ll tell dad’ then the other replying ‘I’ll tell him your dirty secret then, too.’ What a miserable stranglehold to have each other in.

Unable to write to Jacob about it Downey drafts pangeanics to Ludo. Odes on reams of paper to how miserable he is and how he misses Ludo and wishes he were in the city so they could talk. Even if it was for five seconds on the street.

‘Nothing in Ankh-Morpork is worth much since you’ve taken yourself off to Klatch,’ Downey writes. ‘The weather hates me. Dad is a bore. I had the misery of seeing Dog-botherer when I least wanted to. My sister and I are blackmailing each other. I miss you and wish you were here because then at least there’d be someone I could talk to.’

Ludo had asked what the blackmail was about but Downey evades that question. If Ludo is ever going to know about Jacob Downey wants to tell him in person so he can properly gauge Ludo’s reaction. It will also allow him to explain that no, Downey isn’t like those limp-wristed men who nance about. Downey isn’t one of _them_ . He just happens to like men. That doesn’t make him one of _those_ sorts people laugh and whisper about. And, in all honestly, Downey doesn’t think much about it.

But still, he misses Ludo and wants his friend back so he can sit on a rooftop and drink with him and complain about all and sundry.

Who can he be ugly around except for Ludo? Who can he be honest with but Ludo?

Downey sighs, folds up Ludo’s letters and hides them beneath the loose floorboard next to the select two from Jacob he has kept. His mother has been calling him on behalf of his father and all he wants to do is sleep for a week and never see his family again. Is that too much to ask for? He thinks, Probably I’m being ungrateful. I’ve very good at that.

 

Amos, on the way to the counting house, ‘you look like a walking bruise, William.’

‘I’m wearing red. Sort of.’

‘It’s so dark it could be black. It’s a disagreeable colour.’

Downey catches sight of himself in a shop window and thinks he looks great. It’s hard to balance his personal aesthetic with his dad’s desire for him to wear things that aren’t associated with the assassins’ guild.

They round the corner and there, again, to Downey’s personal horror and embarrassment is Dog-botherer.

The other young man nods to Downey who nods back. Then, continuing with Downey’s personal horror, Vetinari approaches them.

‘Hello, Downey.’

Oh Dog-botherer is in black and looking cool and well put together. Downey hates him with a fervour.

‘Hello, Vetinari.’

Amos pauses up ahead of them, watching with jaundiced eye.

‘Dr. Tindel said you were doing a project on poison for your final thesis.’

Downey can feel the embarrassment creeping up his chest. He knows his neck is turning scarlet, cheeks will be next. Dog-botherer somehow must know that Downey isn’t going to return and has come to rub his face in it.

‘Yeah. And?’

‘He suggested we do a joint paper.’

Downey knows his cheeks are red. Dog-botherer looks faintly amused. Oh if only his dad weren’t here, he’d punch Dog-botherer in that smug face of his.

‘Bit early to be discussing term papers that haven’t been assigned yet.’

‘On the contrary, Downey. It’s never too early to think about the future. But perhaps you are busy. I am sure we can discuss this in the upcoming weeks. Dr. Tindel said that he is expecting us to do something worth reading. Surely he mentioned it to you.’

‘He did,’ Downey lies. ‘I just haven’t had a chance to think on it, yet.’

Vetinari glances towards Amos then back.

‘Oh yes, I understand.’

No you don’t, Downey thinks. You don’t understand shit. But he manages something like a smile and they part ways with apparent politeness.

‘You met him a few weeks ago,’ Downey says to Amos as they walk on. ‘Havelock Vetinari.’

‘What did he want?’

‘Oh, nothing important.’

Amos does not reply. They continue their day in silence.

 

This is Downey’s day:

Update the ledgers with incoming supplies. Sort what needs to go where and who owes what money. Ensure the shipments arrive to the grocers and other petty artisans and shopkeepers. Late lunch with Amos and the other men of the Guild wherein Downey sits silently as they discuss, with grave faces, stocks in ships and trading companies and the Almanac's prediction for upcoming winter weather. Then, to the docks to see the goods they’re selling on to other cities. Letters to various and sundry in the familial mercantile network. Tea, more sombre conversations. Sundry errands. Guild Hall for a meeting. Home for supper then his father insists he sits with him in the counting room pouring over the family’s accounts.

By eleven he is released upstairs to go to bed. It is therefore, at half eleven and in a fit of desperation, that Downey is writing to Dr. Tindel.

 

His skin itches. His chest wants to cave in on itself. He cannot live this life. He cannot do this. He cannot be a merchant and marry Annabelle Thurrough and have ten kids, four of whom survive to adulthood. He cannot then watch his children go through the same miserable exercise of existence he went through.

He writes that he is coming to the guild in autumn. That he will write however many papers are needed, even with dreadful Havelock Vetinari if needs must, and he has outlined his thoughts on how to approach his thesis and Dr. Tindel can find them attached to this letter and, by any chance, just out of curiosity, how much is this going to cost again?

He has no idea how he is going to do it. Like hell will he beg, like hell will he accept a scholarship, but gods above and below he is going to get away.

‘What are you doing?’ A sickly sweet voice asks from the door.

‘Piss off, Sicily.’

‘Writing to someone you shouldn’t be writing to?’

‘I’m writing to Dr. Tindel of the Assassins’ Guild.’ He twists in his chair as he says it. Sicily stands on the threshold of his room in night-shift, dressing gown with hair pinned up in curlers.

‘Oh? Not to your-’

‘Dr. Tindel,’ he brandishes the letter. ‘Now go away.’

She loiters, ‘Rob and I-’

‘I really don’t care, Sicily.’

‘I love him.’ She is both proud and anguished. Downey wishes he could respond in kind but knows she will only laugh at him. Men don’t love men the way they love women. It’s a dalliance, then you get married and have children. That is the natural order of the world.

‘That’s nice,’ he sneers.

‘You can’t take that away from me.’

‘More’s the pity.’

‘You can kill me, Will, you can do whatever brutish act you want to end my life but you’ll not take my love.’

‘Good lord, have you been practicing this? You’re worse than a two-penny actress. Piss off, Sicily. It’s late.’

She makes one last grandstand about her love before turning on her heel.

Gods, Downey thinks once settled in bed, what a beastly and embarrassing family I have.

 

/

 

The dye is from the Genua region, Downey thinks.

He is sitting at the lab table he usually uses for distilling poisons with test equipment out and a particularly powerful magnifying glass. Harold sleeps beneath his feet and Alasce sits panting up at him in an expectant manner.

‘I’m not talking you out yet,’ he says to her. She continues to stare at him with hope. ‘Later, Alsace. You’ve already had your morning walk.’

She yips at the word ‘walk’ and Downey casts a disparaging glance her way. This does nothing to discourage the dog and she yips again.

‘That’s enough. Lie down.’

She does, with evident disgust. Harold snorfles and rolls over.

But the fabric. The fabric is evidently Genuan royal blue. A particular blend of rocks and flowers makes this dye and he would know the compound anywhere having had the origin and make-up hammered into his head in his younger years.

Who sells Genuan blue cambric? Off the top of his head he can think of four merchants. He discounts his father, so three merchants. Sicily wouldn’t buy from our father, he thinks, she wouldn’t want that sort of contact with him.

But there are surely more. The ones he is thinking of are from thirty years ago and he knows things have changed since then.

He hates the colour blue.

His mother liked him in blue when he had been a boy. She had said it was more cheerful than black. His father wore a lot of blue, too. It seemed to be the family colour, so much as a merchants family would have a colour.

His mother, gods has she aged. But she’s in her seventies and had lived a very hard seventy years. Looking back he marvels at how quickly she aged from when he was a lady of nine, ten to when he was a young man of twenty. He thinks it mostly his father’s fault, and the debit-credit column of the family finances which he, guiltily, knows was a bit of his fault for wanting such an expensive education for himself. But also his father’s fault for saying yes. It was his mother Annette who bore the brunt of the stress of it, though.

 

He focuses on the mystery of Sicily’s dead, hated, husband. This is easier to compute than family relations. Who wanted him dead? Sicily. Downey thinks he should ask around with some of his father’s old friends, see if Carter owed money to anyone.

But it was Sicily who planted to guild paper beneath her husband’s body before calling the Watch. Downey is certain of this. But, he reasons, she was always a vulture. Opportunistic use of the murder of one pesky male relative to get rid of another. Or, at least, to be a pain in the royal backside to another.

As he makes a list of people to visit with Mericet peaks his head around the lab door, ‘someone to see you.’

‘Gods, if it’s an irate parent they will have to wait until parent-teacher conferences after fall term starts. I’m not taking anymore complaints about poor little Bobbie’s grades, especially if poor little Bobbie hasn’t turned in a shred of homework all summer.’

‘It’s your sister, Downey.’

‘Fuckshit.’

‘I told her you’d see her in your office.’

‘ _Which_ sister, Mericet?’

‘The one you like.’

‘Oh good.’ Downey spins in his chair, disrupting the dogs, and follows Mericet into the hall. ‘Do you know a John Carter?’

Mericet ponders for a moment before shaking his head. No, no, he’s never heard of a John Carter before. Terribly common name, isn’t it? Dreadfully common.

Downey doesn’t point out that William Downey isn’t much better. Mericet sniffs as he continues to ponder John Carter the name, the man, the people he may or may not know.

‘Anyway,’ Mericet says as they come to a diverging path in the guild halls. ‘I will have the school policy update to you by the end of the week. I know Lady T’Malia is going over the uniform code again.’

‘Skirts to the knees for girls,’ Downey says sternly. ‘And shorts to the knees for boys.’

‘T’Malia agrees in principle.’

‘ _Good_.’

Mercit smiles, a watery milk experience.

 

‘Sister mine,’ Downey greets as he enters his office. ‘Oh good, you’ve made yourself a drink.’

Magda makes a face at him, ‘I’ve been waiting for half an hour.’

‘That’s Mericet’s fault. Man is ancient, probably forgot you were here. Do you want a top up?’

She hands over her glass and he pours her another sherry then one for himself.

‘He taught me and he looked ancient back then, too,’ he continues as he seats himself. ‘How’s Samantha?’

‘In love.’

‘What? She was heartbroken a week ago.’

‘Youthful resilience. Her current heartthrob is a boy down the street named Jeff.’

‘Who names their child Jeff? I don’t approve.’

‘Who names their child Magda?’

Downey grins, ‘true, you got the rum end of the stick. Anyway, glad to hear she’s back in top form. What brings my favourite sister here?’

‘It’s dad.’

Downey stands and goes to the door. He whistles and waits for a moment as both Alsace and Harold trot into the room before closing the door.

‘I saw mom,’ he says.

Magda blinks in surprise. She makes an ‘oh’ sound and looks at him expectantly.

‘She seemed well.’

‘I know,’ Magda says. ‘Did you see dad?’

‘No.'

‘She came to me this morning crying.’

‘Oh.’

‘She said she wanted you to see him. This explains the sudden weeping though, Will. You could have gone upstairs, since you were there.’

‘No, I couldn’t’ve.’

‘What happened to your eye?’

‘Sicily’s dead husband.’ Downey then explains the altercation with Vimes and Magda says that she’s glad some things haven’t changed. Like Downey’s penchant for brawling. ‘I don’t brawl.’

‘Of course not, Will.’ She swirls the sherry. ‘This is such a mess.’

‘Yes, our family doesn’t do things gently.’

‘No,’ she sighs. ‘Gods no we don’t. It’s been years since I’ve seen mom cry you know. It’s from the stress of it, of dad and Sicily who isn’t talking to them really, but they know everything that’s happening, and everyone on the street is talking. Do you know what mom was crying over? Bridge. She was not invited to the ladies’ bridge game this week.’

‘The stakes are high, I see.’

Magda shoots him a dirty look. He mutters half an apology.

‘Be an adult, Will. Go do a proper visit.’

Downey thinks he doesn’t owe his father a thing, nor his mom for that matter. He has tried to explain this to Magda in the past but she, like dad, boils everything down to blood. You do honourably by your blood and that’s that.

‘I will think about it,’ Downey says. ‘But I make no promises.’

 

/

 

Annabelle Thurrough is over at the behest of her mother. They are chaperoned by Downey’s mom and Downey wants to complain that really, this isn’t necessary. Annabelle isn’t his type and he doubts that he is her type. They aren’t about to compromise her virtue if left alone for fifteen minutes.

His mom sews silently by the fire. Everything his mom does is delicately quiet. She should be an assassin, Downey thinks, provided women are ever allowed to be assassins.

‘I got your letters,’ Annabelle says stiffly.

‘And I yours.’

They are not looking at each other. Downey wonders, if he wishes hard enough, could he disappear her.

‘I’m glad summer is treating you well,’ he says after a few minutes. ‘Do you have any plans for the weekend?’

‘I’m going to visit with my cousin.’

‘That’s nice.’

‘And you?’

‘I have some guild business dad is going to bring me along to.’

‘That’s nice.’

Downey sighs. Annabelle sighs. They have reached this impasse since being mean to each other has not done much for the situation and neither is interested in being nice so indifferent is where they land.

It could be worse, Downey thinks. She could be simpering and sweet.

Thankfully, the Thurroughs are diligent in their visiting and only stay for the required fifteen minutes so once the quarter hour chimes Annabelle is out of her seat and to the door and Downey is smilingly gentle as he sees her off.

‘It gets easier.’

Downey seats himself by his mom with a curious look.

‘What does?’ He asks.

‘Speaking with your intended. There are silences in the beginning but it gets easier.’

Downey thinks that he hasn’t heard his parents have a real conversation in years so he isn’t sure he believes her.

‘Marriages do not require love, Will, just trust that the other person is in your corner. Marriage is about confidence.’

Downey mumbles an ‘all right mom.’ He wants to say that he isn’t inclined to marriage, that he’d never be able to marry anyone with confidence, as his mom puts it.

Perhaps that’s why he doesn’t know what to do with Jacob, or how to make their relationship function beyond discreet meetings and furtive glances. He’s never seen a proper relationship modelled. He thinks he should write that to Ludo. If anything, Ludo might be impressed with the insight. Is it insightful? Downey suddenly wonders. Or have people known this for years and I’m just catching on now?

He picks at the edge of his sleeve until his mom tells him to be still.

‘What were grandma and grandpa like?’

She looks up from her mending, ‘how do you mean?’

‘What were they like married?’

‘I wouldn’t write a symphony about it.’

Downey finds this discouraging. ‘Did they love each other?’

Annette knots the string and leans over to cup her son’s face. ‘They found a gentle way to be. Now, go get ready for supper.’

 

A letter to Ludo:

What are your parents like? I know you talk about them as parents but what are they like as partners? Do they speak language or silence? Do they touch skin or empty spaces? I do not doubt my dad and mom care for each other. Twenty-seven years married they must at least care about have the other person occupy a shared house with them. I think, were dad to die or mom to die, the other would be upset. Mom would cry, dad would work. If I end up married to Annabelle Thurrough we’d never make it twenty-seven years. One of us would kill the other, first.

 

A letter from Ludo:

What a queer letter from you, Will. My parents love each other. They married for love. My father rode across the dessert to pluck a night blooming Jasmine flower for my mother. They are one of those couples who are so in love everyone else, including children, are secondary. It perfumes the house and all who reside within it.

Don’t marry Annabelle Thurrough. Come back to the Guild. Duty to one’s family is honourable and important, society is built on familial networks, but do not kill yourself over it. Don’t force yourself into shoes that do not fit.

Anyway, if you don’t come back to the Guild who will hold my hair back as I puke my guts out at Simmerson’s flat parties?

 

//


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> nb: changed Cruces to Tindel due to Tolpen catching that bit in Men at Arms where it's clear he and D hate each other. Thank you for that!

Plants, like humans, have veins, ribs, tissue. They can be folded, smoothed out, sutured together. The midrib vein of a leaf is only so sturdy as the thick necked muscles of a person covering arteries, precious flesh soft on inner thigh, is sturdy. Cut into it and curved teeth of a knife will do equal damage. Flesh is dough, wait for flour to spill out. Even the flesh of plants. Overrippened fruit smelling sickly sweet, pungent on the cobbles of streets. Soft.

It is remarkably difficult to kill someone and it is remarkably easy. Forget to water them. Deprive them of nutrients. Slowly strip flesh from the body around and around in circles, or are we discussing stripping bark from trees? Both cause death.  

Downey does not subscribe to animism, at least where plant life is concerned. Dogs have souls. Humans, for the most part. He isn’t sure on the theology of the undead. Then there are ghosts scrapping pale bodies across no longer existing firmaments of houses they once knew. Faceless they shudder and sigh, or laugh and dance. He has seen joyful phantoms.

Plants might not have souls but they do have voice. Trees talk to one another. As do mushrooms. Some flowers are capable of it, others not so much. Intelligence varies from one to the other. Like humans. And dogs.

Highly edible sweet yellow garste flowers produce a coconut-flavored wine if one enjoys the luxury of time, and a tea prescribed in cases of uncertainty, for those who appear to have lost all hope. Downey fingers their tender petals. The sap of the garste is white, sticky and causes scalding rashes. If you rub it against your palms you stigmata yourself.

He thinks that there is a metaphor somewhere in all of this. The brambles of his greenhouse with its damp smell, that earthy scent.

The garste comes in several colours though the yellow is his favourite. There’s also pink and white. He has found the sap from the white to be the stronger irritant of the three. As a boy, he once collected it and mixed it in to a hand lotion a fellow student always used.

‘I was always a bit of a cad,’ he tells the flower. ‘But your kind have always been an enabler.’

‘Don’t blame the plants for your own bad behaviour, Downey.’

Vetinari materializes rather than arrives. Downey thinks he really ought to fix the back door of the greenhouse.

‘I can’t help it,’ Downey replies. ‘Have to pass the blame around a little bit. What do you think of metaphors?’

Vetinari tilts his head to the side, a calculating expression. He says that they are sort of a weariness of the flesh for poets.

‘Weariness of the flesh, I like that.’

‘Feel free to use it. It wasn’t mine originally.’

‘Don’t admit that,’ Downey chides. ‘Claim ownership over it. It’s a nice phrase.’

Vetinari raises an eyebrow but does not respond. Downey puts the garste flower back in its spot on the bench and wonders if Vetinari is going to tell him why he’s here or if Downey is going to have to do the prying. It’s that strange twilight time of early morning where the sky is still dark but the hint of day creeps in about the edges.

‘I spoke with the Commander,’ Vetinari says at length. They’re heading towards the back of the greenhouse and Downey investigates his plants with diligence.

‘Did you?’

‘He wants to arrest you.’

Downey says that oh yes, so nothing new then. The commander would arrest every assassin if he could which would lead to an interesting political state of affairs considering Vetinari’s former profession.

‘Something about tampering with evidence.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Downey,’ Vetinari’s voice is one of deep disapproval.

‘I would never tamper with evidence.’

‘Perhaps tamper is the wrong word. The commander complained about disappearing evidence.’

‘I would never.’

Vetinari leans against a table and watches as Downey pokes damp soil at a plant’s base. It is with great reluctance that Downey relents insisting that it’s only because the matter strikes close to home.

‘Let the commander do his job,’ Vetinari says once Downey finishes his explanation.

Downey points with a small spade, ‘if I trusted him I’d leave well enough alone. But things are sticky.’

‘I won’t say it again.’

Downey opens his mouth then clamps shut. Mutters fine, fine, he’ll leave the commander alone. Would it be possible to have the commander tromp about less on guild premises? Vetinari’s expression is answer enough so he sighs and returns to the plants.

‘So?’ Vetinari asks. Downey takes a newly bloomed flower and tucks it in a button hole of Vetinari’s outer coat. ‘What did the evidence tell you?’

‘Genuan dye, royal blue to be exact. In Genua it’s limited to certain classes by their sartorial laws but here it’s more common.’

‘I assume you have some ideas on who sells it?’

‘Perhaps. But I doubt it’ll be of much use. As I said, common enough in Ankh-Morpork.’

‘And you’ll be passing this information, and the evidence, back to the Watch?’

Downey says ‘sure’ and Vetinari takes out the flower from button hole to look at before saying ‘good.’ And Downey wants to mutter rude things but refrains. It is these moments when he returns to being just plain Will, not Dr. William Downey, not Lord Downey, not Master of the Assassins’ Guild. Just plain Will. And the other becomes Dog-botherer, not Dr. Havelock Vetinari of too many advanced degrees, not Lord Vetinari, not Patrician of Ankh-Morpork. Just Dog-botherer.

‘I tried for years to come up with something for your given name.’

Vetinari blinks.

‘Sorry,’ Downey is something like sheepish. ‘You’re not in my head. The old nick-name.’

‘Is that what you term it?’

‘It wasn’t always one, but it sort of morphed into that after time. Better than Battler like Geoff Crumhorn’s.’

‘Battler?’

‘Battle of Crumhorn. “Battle of” becomes Battler. I almost called him Meade because you drink it out of horns but Battler stuck. Don’t judge me. I can see you judging me. Then there was Sump which was Seb’s due to a stitching error on his jumper’s name-tag.’

‘That poor boy.’

‘He ran with it.’

Vetinari murmurs that really, at the guild, there was no other choice when Downey had decided to bestow a name upon a person.

‘You called Ludo “swamp pants” for the first few years if I remember correctly,’ Vetinari adds, ‘he somehow escaped it.’

‘He had trousers with a pattern that looked like a swamp all right?’  

Vetinari looks up. The greenhouse glass, yellowed, refracts soft early morning sun down to some of the discs more deadly plants. He breathes in. The air is stifling, even for the morning. If it is warm outside, it is claustrophobic in the greenhouse. Vetinari doesn’t understand how Downey appears unaffected by the cloying humidity, the way tangibility of the air seems to sink teeth through clothes into skin.

He’s sweating. It's the morning. How is he sweating? He hates that he’s sweating. Downey is by an orchid humming to himself.

Mad botanist _indeed_.

‘Dare I ask what you came up with for my given name?’ The heat makes madness contagious. Vetinari thinks he shouldn’t be asking this. With Downey, it’s bound to be terrible.

‘I didn’t get very far once I landed on Dog-botherer to be honest. And, so fas as names-given-to-you-at-boarding-school go, it’s a classic. D’you have a lock for your dog? I don’t remember. I was trying to make something with locks pan out.’ Downey sighs from behind the orchid. ‘This one isn’t behaving.’

‘Is it rare?’

‘Murderously. Stocking Orchid, as the leaves look like wet stockings. A decidedly ugly name for a rather pretty orchid.’

Vetinari philosophically inquiries as to the legality of the acquisition and Downey points at him with dirt covered fingers saying that he acquired it in the classic manner that rare orchids are acquired.

‘Gods, Downey,’ Vetinari sighs. ‘Don't say anything else. As Patrician I don’t want to be party to your illicit plant side-line.’

‘What illicit plant sideline?’

‘I read books,’ primly said. ‘I know how rare orchids are attained.’

Downey grins. It’s vicious.

 

It isn’t until after fourth year elementary poisons course that Downey is able to take an hour to slip over to the Watch with a shabbily concocted story. He ends up saying to an irritated Commander, ‘look, it’s not my fault.’

‘Like hell it isn’t.’

‘I returned it. As I said, woke up this morning. Voila, the vial with the fabric was on my desk. I haven’t the foggiest how it got there.’

Vimes snatches the piece of evidence back with a murderous expression. He jabs his cigar towards Downey, ‘if I find even an _iota_ of evidence that you did this I am going to make your life very difficult.’

‘How exhausting it must be to be you. So angry all the time. All right, all right I’m leaving.’ Downey follows Vimes’ pointed finger towards the door. ‘Have a lovely day, your grace. I know I am.’

 

Dyers woad, Downey has seen the small flowers pricked out in yellow on the formal clothes of the city's Dyers. The ones they wear to state events and guild meetings. The city Dyers have their own guild, of course, but as their business is so closely tied to that of the merchants there is often overlap.

Woad, weld, and madder. Blue, yellow, and red. There was a poem about them that he memorized as a child but woad is no longer the means to create blue. It’s all controversial, devilish indigo now. So where does woad rest but in long-ago sewn flowers in the hems of tunics, down the edge of girdles, the winter time embroidery of the Dyer’s Guild. Memories of an old way of making the deep colours of the sky spill onto linens.

He is thinking about indigo fabric, that royal blue, when he sees a flash of it. Such a striking colour, it blooms before eyes the way Klatchian Red and Genuan Purple bloom before eyes. The royal blue is a gown, the skirts split with red blossoming beneath, embroidered stomacher, chain girdle, small girdle book, wide Genuan sleeves, blue hood atop linen cap, wearing all of this with head bowed and ducking down an alley is Sicily.

Always dressed so fine, Downey thinks. Always dressed like there’s someone here to see her. Definitely not dressed like a woman in mourning. What her neighbours must think.  

A split second decision and Downey abandons his half-formed intention of getting ahead of lesson plans and follows her. It’s past the dye works and the tanners, their foul stench amplified by the season, and through to dockyards. There, she lowers the hood she had up and looks around before going over to a collection of crates. Downey keeps a safe distance to spy from and watches with growing amusement and a sense of _aha_ as Rob Flint, blacksmith, former lover, steps out to take her hand.

The two duck behind the crates and disappear from view. Downey leans against brick alley wall. Taking out a cigarette, he lights it, breathes in deeply, and thinks the day just been _greatly_ improved.

 

/

 

Dr. Tindel’s reply comes with the morning post and Downey is itching to disappear with the letter. It is a full envelope so he knows that the man wrote an epic as a response which, in Downey’s brief experience with the the higher levels of guild academics, is a good thing. With careful, discreet shifting he shoves the letter up his waistcoat for later.

‘Dad not down yet?’ He asks to distract from his jitteriness.

‘He went early to temple,’ Annette replies.

‘Odd day for it.’

Annette silently puts toast and cold cuts on the table. Her children wait for a response. Downey begins to become suspicious when his mom looks at him for a long while then at Magda for a long while. It is the look of someone losing something.

‘What brought him there?’ Magda prompts.

Tea is passed around and butter. Summer heat has already turned the cream and so they drink it black and scorching.

‘Mom?’ Sicily says.

‘Your dad has gone to speak with the priest.’

‘Yes,’ Downey says. ‘We gathered that.’

‘About marriages.’

All become very interested in their breakfasts save Laure who hadn’t had much interest in the conversation from the beginning.

Downey can feel the letter against his stomach. His muscle curl, tighten. He nibbles at the toast. A glance around the table sees Magda diligently eating, Laure uninterested, Sicily pale.

‘He’ll be back shortly, I’m sure.’ Annette says. Downey thinks his mom could outdo a statue for how still she is. How unmoving her face. Where was the woman from the other night who told him that marriage was about confidence?

Right here, in front of him, he reasons. Doing her bit out of confidence that her husband knows best.

‘I will not marry whoever dad has picked out,’ Sicily declares sitting back with arms crossed. She pushes her bottom lip out. ‘It’s not fair. We’re the ones who have to live with the decision. We should have some say.’

‘That’s in fiction, Sicily,’ Annette replies quietly. Her expression has not changed from the resolved stillness. ‘You will do your duty.’

‘I want to choose my own husband.’

‘You do not know what to look for. You’re young and have no experience in the world.’

Sicily fumes. Magda continues to be diligent with her breakfast. Downey says a vague line about having forgotten something in his room and retreats upstairs to read his letter. He thinks, If I am going to make a move I’m going to have to do it soon.

I’ll have to change my name and wear a wig. Dad won’t take kindly to being made a fool of in front of the Thurroughs. The shame, not being able to control his son enough to drag him up to the altar.

Granted, he muses, Annabelle might set everything on fire before then.

He would help her, should it come to that.

 

 

Sitting on the floor by the board where he stashes his letters Downey opens the envelope with great care. Dr. Tindel’s wax seal is a deep red and his initials elegantly stamped into it. The paper’s heavy weight indicating its quality. It’s almost soft. He prefers Dr. Tindel’s handwriting to anyone else’s and does his best to mimic it. The letters stand on their own to him, compared to that of his dad or Annabelle or Ludo or anyone else, really.

Well, he amends, Dog-botherer’s hand is legible. His letters stand alone, too.

Dr. Tindel opens with the usual lines about it being good to hear from Mr. Downey (Downey frowns, he cannot wait to be a Dr. or, even better, a Lord), and that summer term has progressed nicely etc. etc. Downey reads with the pained slowness of one expecting the worst.

‘Your proposal is most interesting and I would be more than happy to be your supervisor. I have outline my thoughts (attached) and believe that there is much merit in what you are planning to do. I appreciate your concern about the financial issues surrounding the pursual of a doctorate and would be happy to discuss them with you in person. My office hours are noted below, you may come whenever is convenient to you.

As you are planning to return, I have already spoken with Mr. Vetinari about a joint project for the end of your first year. Although your research areas are different I believe that there will be much to gain, for both of you, in working together. Cross-pollination between subjects may be taboo amongst some of my colleagues, but I believe research is only strengthened when scopes are broadened for some of the background readings. We will discuss further when you visit.’

It continues on in the same vein. Downey grins at the paper. He knows, as he does so, that it is a stupid expression and so attempts to school his face into seriousness.

He reads the letter again, to make sure it wasn’t all a hallucination. Dr. Tindel thinks his ideas are good, that he has _potential._ This is terribly exciting. He wants to tell Ludo, he wants to tell Jacob, he wants to tell everyone. Instead, with great care, he hides the letter away and begins to devise a way to visit during one of the office hours.

Fate, deciding to be in his corner this day, arranges the day nicely so Downey hears with pleasure that Amos intends him to run errands for the morning and early afternoon giving Downey ample opportunity to visit Dr. Tindel. Normally, Downey resents running errands as if he is some lowly dogsbody (doesn’t his dad appreciate what he has to offer?) but today he is happy to be out of the guild. Out from the stern looks of Amos and other merchants as they count coin and plan shipments.

And the day is so beautiful!

Well, it’s overcast and soupy. But Downey decides that it’s beautiful. Because he has _potential_ and a possibility of escape. Walking as quickly as he can without breaking into a jog Downey cruises through his list of errands until a reasonable amount are done and he can safely visit the Assassins’ Guild.

The courtyard is mostly empty save for some second and third years loitering around the defunct well. Downey heads into the alcoves then up the beautiful, wide stairs of marble to the main hall then down it to the teachers’ offices. He stands in front of Dr. Tindel’s. Fading script of the professor’s name tell the story of his merit, his ability, his soundness as a professor and assassin.

A glance in the nearest reflective surface (a plaque to a dead assassin) to smooth down his hair and make sure he is presentable then he knocks, holding his breath as he does so.

‘Come.’

Downey breaths out. Opens the door.

The room is as bright as a room can be on a cloudy day. The large, street facing windows let in as much light as possible. Tindel sits behind his desk with glasses on and a stack of papers before him.

‘Summer term essays on the history of assassination in early Klatch,’ Tindel says. ‘Please, take a seat, and don’t look so nervous. I don’t eat prospective doctoral students.’ Eyes drop to Downey’s clothes. Instantly, the young man feels shame. ‘I see about your point regarding funding.’

‘I don’t want a scholarship.’

‘No and you don’t qualify, I believe. But there are options and we will come to them. All in all, I think everything will be manageable. Now, let us discuss an approach to your proposed research. Mushrooms,’ a collapsing smile. ‘I haven’t had anyone tackle them in years. Mostly because there isn’t much interest beyond knowing which ones are poisonous and which ones aren’t but your proposal is quite interesting.’ He pauses and peers at Downey over his glasses, ‘I think it a topic that we best keep quiet. Considering the Patricians current paranoias.’

‘Dad says he’s paranoid of paranoia.’

‘A satirical approach to politics, enjoyable. Though not recommended for a long a life. _You_ are not political.’

‘No, sir.’

‘Not likely to go out with something stupid such as lilac pinned to your sleeve?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Good. I like my students to be pragmatic about things. Revolutions bring more of the same but with different names. I don’t think humans are equipped for equality. We enjoy standing on top of each other too much. But perhaps I am just a cynical old man. Your friend Mr. Vetinari did not agree with my sentiments although he’s too polite to say so.’

‘He’s not my friend.’

‘No? Well, I’m afraid you will still be sharing a research project with him.’

‘Must I?’

‘You must,’ Tindel smiles, this one bright. ‘Consider it a lesson in learning to rub along with those you don’t like. It’s an important one and if I recall your record from your undergraduate years it’s a lesson you might want to learn.’

Downey flushes chest to cheeks. Tindels softens, waving his hand saying he is not here to lecture Downey on his past misadventures as guild trouble maker.

‘I am happy to take you on,’ Tindel says. ‘I am excited to see where your research leads you. When did you settle on this topic?’

‘End of my masters. I did a research paper, just something small, on it. I included the final draft in my letter—’

‘Oh yes, I recall. Very informative.’

‘But it’s long been an interest, sir. I did some work during early guild years on spores and their pneumatic potential. Ludo and I wrote a joint paper in our final year on it, actually. But I did most of the lab work. He did the background.’

‘I’m sure it was illuminating.’

‘Some do.’

‘Pardon?’

‘Mushrooms. Illuminate.’ Downey stops abruptly. Gives an awkward smile.

‘Youthful enthusiasm and single-mindedness, excellent. Now, what I want next from you is a list of all the books you think you need to read to provide a thorough grounding in the subject. I will augment it once I receive it. If I could have it by the start of next term that would be appreciated.’

‘Yes, sir. I will get it to you.’

The remainder of the meeting is spent with Tindel outlining teaching and research options for Downey. He frames it as ‘this will provide invaluable work experience that most students do not have access to and it comes with room, board and a small stipend.’

Downey worries he is too enthusiastic as he accepts.

‘It will be teaching first and second years introductory biology. Not very intellectually stimulating work, I’m afraid, but integral to their ability to succeed at the guild.’

‘I will do my best, sir.’

Tindel hums that he certainly expects nothing less than Downey’s best. Downey tries to sit up straighter but can’t. They bid farewell and Downey promises to keep in touch as his reading list is developed over the remainder of the summer. At the door he hears Tindel say that he is pleased Downey’s parents are letting him continue. So many want to their sons to follow in their footsteps, not deviate to a new path.

Downey just nods with tight jaw. Opening the door he finds himself face to face with Vetinari.

‘Hello, Downey,’ Vetinari says amiably. There are books tucked beneath his arm. Downey glares.

‘You were listening at the door, dog-botherer,’ he hisses low.

Vetinari steps aside so Downey can move past. He says that he was not listening at the door, but that he had come to see Dr. Tindel about some very interesting discoveries he has made in the library.

Oh, Downey thinks, this is what I should be doing. I should be here at the guild working on my research because look at this, Dog-botherer hogging all of Dr. Tindel’s time with his stupid books and his stupid finds. I should be here just to make sure I don’t fall behind.

‘Sure you were, dog-botherer.’

Vetinari shrugs, 'it’s your prerogative to believe that, Downey.’

‘You’re such a--’

‘Scag, yes I know.’

‘Obnoxious, arrogant twit.’

Vetinari raises his eyebrows. ‘A new insult. Growth is possible.’ Vetinari shuts his mouth abruptly, an almost startled look passing across his face. Downey sneers.

‘Boys,’ Tindel intones from his desk. ‘I have things to do so either come in or leave.’

Downey pushes past Vetinari, making sure to jar his shoulder as he does. What right does Dog-botherer have to be gaining a headstart on his studies when Downey is stuck mouldering at the Merchant’s guild? It is all so abysmally unfair.

Life, he fumes as he stomps back to work. It’s nothing but trouble.

 

 

Coming home Downey runs upstairs to his room to divest himself of the papers about research guidelines Dr. Tindel had given him that had spent the remainder of the day plastered between Downey’s under-shift and waistcoat. Nudging the plank open he quickly deposits the papers in and does a quick reorganization.

Ludo’s letters are to one side, Dr. Tindel’s in the centre, and the two he kept from Jacob buried towards the back. He knows he should burn them but cannot bear to get rid of every piece of correspondence they’ve exchanged. Some things are too precious to destroy.

He thinks that he loves the fabric of Jacob and there’d be this unspeakable loss if anything were to happen between them. A sadness of cotton made for handkerchiefs. He does not like the sticky feeling of sadness. The way it attaches itself to skin and you can’t wash it off. He would run from every sadness in life, if he could.

‘What’s that?’

He slams the loose board back down and hauls Sicily out of his room by the back of her dress.

‘Don’t you dare come in my room,’ he snarls.

‘Secret stash of illicit letters?’ She hisses. ‘All to other men I bet. Disgusting.’

‘Piss off.’

‘Is that all you can come up with? Piss off?’

He glares, desperate for words, but they’ve scattered to foreign territories.

‘You think you’d have a bigger vocabulary considering that fine education you got.’

‘Go away.’

‘Let me see them,’ she tries to dart around him but he catches her arm. ‘If they’re nothing important you shouldn’t be worried about me reading them.’

‘They’re not your business.’

‘Lots of things aren’t _your_ business but you’ve made them so. It’s only fair I return the sentiment.’

‘Sicily--’

She twists around and slaps him. Downey shoves her back so she stumbles. As she falls over the hem of her skirts Amos appears on the landing, great and terrible in his presence.

Immediately both freeze.

‘What’s the meaning of this?’

‘It’s her fault.’

‘It’s his fault.’

Amos looks between them. ‘It must be something to have you fighting like children. I don’t accept such behaviour in my house.’

Sicily scrambles up and adjusts her apron, her hair, she casts distracted glares towards Downey who wishes he could shrink into shadows.

‘I have just had acceptance of both of your matches and me and your future father-in-laws are about to sign agreements as to dowry. I therefore expect your behaviour to be that of mature, honourable and acceptable young adults. You will not scrap like alley cats.’

‘Will’s got a secret stash of letters!’ Sicily says it in a rush then slaps a hand over her mouth, eyes wide.  

Downey thinks the world is going to collapse. Or maybe the house will grow teeth and eat him. Either are great options.

‘What’s this?’

‘He sneaks out at night to—’

‘Sicily’s shagging Rob Flint!’ Downey shouts.

Amos becomes still as glass.

Downey’s heart pounds. Sicily is frozen, hand having gone from mouth to her neck.

‘Sicily, go to the counting room. William, stay here.’

Sicily looks at Downey. He cannot read her expression. Beneath her evident fury is another emotion he can’t name but he thinks it’s on his face as well. Maybe this house will grow teeth and eat both of them.

Wouldn’t that be swell?

 

/


	11. Chapter 11

Memories are cartographical. Vetinari thinks this perhaps a florid and inaccurate sentiment but he likes how it sounds. What makes a person the way they are but the events that map life?

Childhood, education, lovers, friends. In the Guild there is also: first death, first inhumation. For some students those firsts are the same, but it isn’t many. Everyone knows someone who has died.

A philosopher from Pseudopolis has posited that the memory of our parents, grandparents stitches itself into the family blood and is passed down through generations. The good and the bad. It becomes ingrained in the flesh of your child, in the flesh of their children.

Vetinari’s earliest memory is Madam’s clothes. Her shawls and shoes. They are bright and present. Purples, pinks, whites, golds. She wears the colours bold enough to hurt.

Some memories are ageless, he just knows he was young. He remembers standing half-hidden on stairs watching men visit and sometimes the women would lead them away. At some point the men would leave. Sometimes, the women would return. Sometimes, they wouldn’t emerge until late the next morning. They’d lounge on couches smelling of dying summer roses and would pet his hair and call him a good lad, a handsome lad. He could not be older than six and had thought it all very mystical.

During his Tour he visited Madam in Genua and she said to him, ‘a man who punches a wall is showing you that he could have punched you but didn’t.’

He had replied, ‘surely that’s a good thing?’

‘Only if you want someone who can think of no other means through which to manage his emotions other than by violence. There is a difference between working out anger physically and showing someone you punched the wall instead of them. It’s all about power, you see.’

He wonders what she was trying to tell him. Clear communication is not their forte. Madam writes in riddles and through poems, deflections, philosophical musings.

To his father she said _, I want you to take me with you but I also no longer wish to interpret._ She also wrote, _The lover, Othered, is exotic, erotic, and confronted constantly by the ‘I’ but yet never speaks._ She was the lover, the othered, the exotic, erotic, speechless but for letters.

To his father, at least. Vetinari knows Madam’s voice and thinks he would not be here, sweating quietly, in the Oblong Office if it wasn’t for all those words she taught him.

Gods, he sighs, squeezes his eyes shut and leans into his chair. This isn’t a thought for late afternoon when the list of meetings is endless.

The Commander has just left and who is next? Moist von Lipwig and other representatives of the banking sector. The top people who can do marvelous things with accounting books include the head of the Ankh Morpork Bank, the Guild of Accountants, and the Assassins Guild when attempting to avoid paying their back taxes (of which they still owe many).

He makes a note to himself, Speak to Downey about back taxes. He makes a mental addendum, During work hours.

Downey has made the argument for attempting to start afresh. Let bygones be bygones. He becomes a remarkably philosophical man when discussing Guild business matters.

Dealing with Ankh-Morpork’s vitally important, and thankfully thriving, business community can be headache inducing. Vetinari considers the pros and cons of postponing the meeting. The cons out weight the pros.

He still toys with the idea for a serious minute before discarding it.

Drumknott knocks on the door.

‘Come.’

‘Mr. Von Lipwig, your lordship.’

‘Send him in.’

  


Later, over tea and a biscuit, Vetinari ponders his addendum: During work hours. This is evidently something they need to discuss. Now that he and Downey _are_. There is a list of issues he has worked out and they must be addressed in order to make their relationship, such as it is, viable. It includes, but is not limited to, appropriate work related boundaries, reasonable meeting times and locations, acceptable subjects to include in notes, and suggestions of coded language although how often he can use “late night tax related conversation” as an excuse to meet remains to be seen.

The need for this conversation became glaringly obvious with the recent scuffles between Assassin and Law Enforcement. Vetinari wants to make it exceedingly clear that in all matters, no matter what they be, City comes first. He assumes Downey already knows this but reminders are never a bad thing. Some gentle, some not-so.

Though it is early days (months, he corrects himself, early months) he thinks things are working out as swimmingly as one could expect. Downey hasn’t set himself on metaphorical fire yet and no one is dead or weeping or drunk.

He has seen Downey on metaphorical fire only once, thirty years ago. Downey blamed his messiness on an absence of Ludo and “Dratted Filthy Parents. Do you have dratted filthy Parents Dog-botherer? No? Fuck you.” Downey had then promptly vomited three-quarters of a bottle of brandy onto Vetinari’s boots.

No, no everything seems to be going well which means it is a good time for them to lay ground rules about interactions and expectations.

Speaking of parents, is Downey’s father dead yet? He doesn't know. He adds it to the discussion list. That is a sticky ball. Vetinari can’t help but pick at it, despite Downey’s churlishness. Fathers are a difficult business for many people. Perhaps it is lucky Vetinari never had one.

Gods, how did he end up here? Spending mental energy on William Downey of all people. The man who labeled him Dog-botherer and used to try and beat him up between classes.

Of course he _knows_ how he ended up here. Vetinari is terribly good at knowing where he is at all times. How he ended up here involves gin, expensive tea, curry, plants, a murderously delicious jawline, and Downey’s brash charming boyishness. Despite this knowingness he still wonders. At the end of the day it really comes down to this strange, unexpected sort of desire to fall into an intimacy. If only he knew how to go about it.

It is too hot for this. Too hot for the biscuit, too. Its crumbling heaviness is not what Vetinari wants this afternoon. He pushes the remnants away and rings for the removal of his tea service.

Downey’ front tooth is still chipped, Vetinari recalls with sudden clarity. The one I gave him when we were boys. It’s been cleaned up since then but noticeable if you’re close. And he’s been very close.

How can you evaluate the viability of love?

Downey said to him the other night that he liked the idea of nothing having been lost if words are wasted. Vetinari likes that.

It feels strange to like something simply for the sake of liking it. Because someone said it and that person is liked so therefore what they have said is more precious for it.

Beneath his desk Mr. Fusspot woofs in his sleep. Kicks out his feet as if to run then wiggles before returning a calm state of rest.

Dogs, Vetinati thinks, we really don’t deserve them.

 

 

/

 

 

Downey believes all gods are sad. They must be. It’s the only explanation.

There are gods for everything. Gods for war for rain for lightning and thunder and lost items and travellers and gardners and martyrdom and the sleepless.

There are gods for the forsaken but the forsaken do not know they have gods.

‘You have no choice, you will marry Annabelle Thurough.’

That is his mummification.

‘You will clean yourself of this filthy habit.’

Peat suffocates. Gods suffocate. His father suffocates. It is another form of drowning. Downey feels water in lungs.

‘We will never speak of this ever again.’

He can see his future with Amos always watching. Always making sure his son doesn’t deviate from the life he has secured for him. Downey can see the walls around him and they are getting closer.

‘What if I don’t want to?’ He whispers.

‘There is no _want_ here, boy. You will do as I say, as you owe me as your father, and you will marry the girl.’

‘What if she doesn’t want to?’

‘There is no want there, either. She will do as she is bid.’

‘What if I refuse?’

‘You won’t.’

‘I am.’

Amos stands tall. He looks down at his son and despite the heat of summer the hallway is very cold. Amos is still. No more balsa tree, he has been burnt in the furnace to turn sand into glass which has become his face. He is so glass.

Downey can’t look at him so is looking down the hall.

‘I am,’ Downey repeats. ‘Refusing.’

Amos turns away. ‘Then I don’t know you, I have never known you, and you were never worthy of what we have wasted on your upbringing.’

The gods at the temple Amos attends are the gods of the ocean, sailors, travellers, and merchants. Gods of counting rooms and scales. Gods of knowing how much your child is worth by the inch. Gods of ransacked bedrooms and flinging letters into the fire. Gods of ordering your son to leave the house because he is no child of yours. Gods of burying a still living young man by saying to your wife, ‘don’t talk to him, don’t look at him, he is dead.’ Gods of marrying your daughter off to someone she doesn’t know before her ruination at the hands of a blacksmith’s apprentice can be known. Gods of peat moss mummified families.   


Downey stands on the street with a bag hastily packed carrying books under his arm and wearing his winter coat even though it’s so very hot.

He doesn’t know where to go. He doesn’t know what happened because his eyes could not see there was so much salt water in them. He feels like he is on fire. He wants to set fire to everything. The house, his family inside, Magda who just watched, his mother who just watched, Laurie who didn’t look, Sicily who was screaming and crying in the counting room. He wants to murder every single one of them.

He tries pounding on the door but it does not open. He screams that he is sorry, that he wants to see his mom. Will she not open the door? Will his mom not say goodbye?

Slowly, curtains across the street are pulled aside, the neighbourhood watch begins. Feeling ashamed of standing so clearly alone, so clearly chucked out, having just been caught crying for his mom, he flips off the few eyes he can see watching him and stalks off.

  


City streets are foreign. Everyone leers at him. Everyone knows what he is and there is no rock to hide beneath. This is exposure, this is shame. He might as well have “dirty sodomite” painted on his forehead. He might as well have a board around his neck with “filthy scag” written on it. Can such gazes of knowing be scrubbed for your skin? He would love to find out. Give him lye and brush and he will try so hard to wash himself.

What is beneath his skin? He would find out if he could.

Dusk bleeds red into royal blue of night but that is above the haze of late summer Ankh-Morpork. Downey walks the city, shoulders aching from his bag and books. He is sweating. He smells like river air, sweat, that rankness of fear. Giving up on walking circles he stops in the middle of the Brass Bridge. Maybe if he gives it a few more hours he’ll be able to go home.

Funny, he’s never much wanted to be in that house until now.

Funny, how that works.

Dumping belongings at his feet he leans against the railing and looks down to murky river. He pulls back and casts around for some stones, find a few pebbles he takes to chucking them as far as he can. If he didn’t have things with him he’d run. He’d run until his lungs wouldn’t let him any more then he’d collapse wherever he was and die and then his family would feel sorry.

Or at least his mom and Magda would.

Running out of pebbles to throw he scours for another handful. The repetition of the act is soothing as he can’t sit down to figure things out yet. Where to go. Who to go to. If Ludo was here it would be different. If Ludo was here he’d find him and they’d drink then he’d ugly cry. As it is, he’s alone on a bridge chucking rocks into the soupy river not crying because he refuses to be that weak when alone because he doesn’t know if he’d be able to stop. With Ludo he can at least stop and function again.

‘Nice night for it.’

Downey freezes mid-throw. Fuck, of course Dog-botherer would be the one here. That’s just his life, for you. This fucking miserable. Fuck.

‘Get fucked, scag.’

Vetinari blinks at him, an oddly owlish affectation.

‘Coming to the guild early?’ Vetinari motions to the bags.

‘Yeah.’ Downey throws another rock into the river. ‘Do you need something?’

‘No.’

‘Then get fucked.’

‘What a terrible place your head must be, Downey.’

Downey curls his lip but can’t think of a reply so returns to determined tossing of rocks.

‘If you’re going to be like this when we work together I’m going to make other arrangements even if Dr. Tindel is against it.’

‘You say this like I should care.’

Vetinari shrugs. Downey wonders why the young man is still loitering.

‘What do you want, Dog-botherer? I’m busy.’

‘I can see that.’ Vetinari gives a small bow, something like a sneer but it might have been an attempt at a polite smile, and walks off.

Downey waits till the nuisance is gone before sinking down and burying his face in his hands.

 

 

/

 

 

Home in the evening and Downey is restless. He doesn’t quite know what to do with the information that Sicily’s childhood beau is in the picture. There’s a deep strain of irony in the situation. Of course it would be August, of course it would be thirty years later, of course it would be as their dad lays dying. Of course this is when Sicily frees herself of her hated husband and the old flame reappears.

Conch shell shaped. That sort of history and present overlapping. You’ve gone forward in time but also you haven’t.

Downey considers the weight of the past. This is a Vetinari thought but he allows it to flourish. It disgusts him how much of who he became is a result of either trying to be like his father or as different as possible from his father. Amos Downey is a difficult man. William Downey became a difficult man.

How annoyingly unoriginal. How annoyingly _uncool._

He smiles. Settling on the floor of the office he pats soft wood so Harold and Alsace trot over and roll onto their back for belly rubs.

‘One thing going for me,’ he says to his dogs. ‘I’m not as hateful as he is. For the most part. Relatively speaking.’

Getting up from the floor, to the complaints of both hounds, Downey goes to one of the bookshelves and plucks a title-less volume off. He stands with forehead pressed against shelf, thumbing. It’s mostly numbers. He finds the page he is looking for and smooths his fingers over faded ink that has become such gentle brown against soft paper.

Four names beside which are numbers.

He wonders if Sicily’s dowry increased to make up for her being most likely viewed as spoilt goods. Perhaps their father managed to hush it up. He never inquired. A drop of water hits the page.

‘Shit.’ He thumbs it off, shoves it back into its slot on the bookshelf.

 

His father is dying.

He doesn’t know what to do with that. He doesn’t know how to be.  

 

He goes to his desk because at the very least he can do work. There is so much of it. He’s been neglectful. Too busy walking endless through city streets, breaking into the Watch House, obsessing over this murder that doesn’t really concern him, tending to his plants, and seeing yet avoiding family.

The stacks of grading sit, a verdict of his inattention.

If he visited his dad then what?

He should. It’s the right thing to do. More than that it’s the expected thing. It is the _correct_ thing. It’s as he learned as a boy: Blood ties defend against the storms of life. Who else is going to take you in when you fall face first somewhere due to bad decisions?

His mind feels on fire. All he wants is calm. This is one of the appealing things about Vetinari. He is calm. He is stillness. That coolness of late autumn that settles some contentment onto Ankh-Morpork.

Maybe, if he visits his father, his mind won’t be flames.

  


The door is the same as he had seen several days ago. It is only half seven so at the very least his mom will be up. Straightening shoulders and standing as tall as he can manage he knocks.

Same as before, he is not prepared for his mom when he sees her.

‘Will!’

She is not prepared for him, either.

‘I know it’s late in the evening-’

‘Come in.’

He does.

Annette speaks in a low voice, the same as she had a few days ago. It’s not the same one he remembers from childhood. It’s quite possible he’s still barred from the house and she is breaking an unofficial rule by allowing him in.

But she said _he_ had changed. People don’t change that much, though. There will always be harshness inside Amos Downey. He’ll always be balsa wood and glass. Jagged edges don’t love.

‘You’re looking well,’ Annette says. Her hands are held flat on her stomach over her apron.

‘I am. And you?’

‘I am.’

He glances into the house from the hall. A smell hits him, tobacco. He closes his eyes.

‘Who’s at the door Annette?’

Amos’ voice has not changed. Annette looks at her son intently. Before Downey can say that it’s been a mistake, he should leave, she replies, ‘a visitor, Amos.’

‘This late?’ A hacking cough follows the question.

Pulmonary, Downey thinks. Deep in the chest. Sounds like there’s a lot of fluid there. You can’t do much once there’s a lot of fluid in the lungs. Perhaps drain it, but that’s risky and death equally likely from the procedure. Has dad tried steam? Like a colicky child--

Annette takes Downey’s arm and tugs him into the house.

It’s like going back through time.

 

Amos Downey, elderly, no longer the big man he had been in his prime, sits by the empty fire grate with a blanket around his shoulders despite the heat. One eye has gone the soft colour of the blind. The other remains clear. Downey stares at him, it is a looking glass to the future.

He has lived a softer life than his dad, though. He will hopefully have a graceful decline.

‘I’ll make tea,’ Annette says leaving the room.

Amos looks at Downey and Downey cannot move. He feels very hot. It’s a hot room, a hot night, but this is heat of shame.

‘Do I know you?’ Amos asks.

‘You did.’

‘From where? Come closer, my vision isn’t what it was.’

‘I was told I should visit. That you aren’t well.’

‘Come here, sir, if you wouldn’t mind. I’d like to see you more clearly.’

Downey approaches. He sits in the chair opposite his father. His coat is still on and he holds his hat in his hands.

Amos looks at his son without expression. Downey thinks he should leave. It was a mistake to come. Where would he go from here? Home? He couldn’t go home after this.

‘I believe I told you to never come into my house again,’ Amos says cooly.

‘You did.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘I was never one for obeying rules.’

Amos looks towards the door. ‘I said all I need to say to you.’

‘Magda said you were dying.’ Downey licks his lips. Leans to rest elbows on knees, he plays with his hat brim. ‘I thought it was the right thing to do. Come and see you.’

‘Not your dirty work is it?’ Amos sneers. Downey recognizes the expression because it is exactly what his own face looks like when he greets the Commander. ‘I’ve heard all about you and what kind of murdering you’re famous for.’  

‘ _Inhuming._ And I don’t do family.’ He doesn’t add that some, like the Commander, may think he has no morals but what does the Commander know? Fuck all. ‘I wanted to see you, dad.’

‘Dad? You’re none of mine.’

Downey continues turning the hat in his hands. Amos takes with a coughing fit, one hand pounding a hollow sounding chest, the other holding a handkerchief to his mouth.

There had been a time when Downey thought his father the strongest man on the Disc. When he had thought him invincible. As a boy he had seen his dad take on some of the dockyard thugs over a cargo dispute and it had been awe inspiring. This was before he went to the Assassins’ Guild. This was before he had learned of life outside of the limited world of merchants.

Now, Amos is ill. Hacking away, dying, and so terribly small. Painful deaths make all men small.

Downey stands as Annette reenters with the best china-wear. He says, ‘I’m sorry, I should go. I didn’t mean to disturb you both. I hope you have a good evening.’

Annette holds the tea tray shaking her head.

‘Let the gentleman go, Annette.’

Downey says goodnight with a smile and a bow. He puts on his hat and leaves.

 

/

 

Finishing throwing rocks into the Ankh Downey knows he must go to the Guild. Since he said he was going there to Dog-botherer he has to prove that point true. And, when he gives it more thought. it is the only reasonable decision. The eventual walk is slow, guilty, embarrassing. Downey concocts story after story for his change of plans but when he is eventually asked by Dr. Tindel he just says, ‘I thought I shouldn’t waste the summer. I can be very wasteful and I’m trying to be better’ and Dr. Tindel just says, ‘all right, then. You’re always welcome.’ Downey does not cry. But his throat aches and eyes are hot.

His room has the sterile feeling of the boxed in. A thin layer of dust has already settled even though it was only a handful of months ago that he left. His bags end up on the floor and he opens the window for better air than the musty smell of warm enclosure.

A moth escapes from the closet when he opens the doors. It’s large, grey with white spots on the wings. Its feathered body beats itself against the window until it finds the opening and goes into moonlight.

At the bottom of his closet are old stockings with holes, a collection of planting pots, a dead basil, and dying monkshood. He takes them and dumps them out his window to the quad below.

A drunk student looks up at him and shouts, ‘the fuck was that Downey?’

Downey leans out and snaps, ‘go home, Willis, you’re drunk.’

‘Damn right I’m drunk. Ludo back yet?’

‘No.’

‘Bugger. Only you and DB here for the remainder of summer. How dull.’ Willis waves and takes himself off.

From a window above Downey is Dog-botherer’s silky voice, ‘would you both please kindly shut up.’

‘Oh fuck off Dog-botherer.’

‘It’s three in the morning, Downey. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable.’

‘Your face is unreasonable.’ Downey slams his window shut and returns to tidying the room. He tries to remember all the tricks to cleaning his mother had tried to impart to him. But thinking of her makes everything blurry so he can’t.

With late summer the room feels confining yet it is nothing like his room at home. He is comforted by this, alienated by it. He wants his comforter and pillow with its case that his grandmother made for him. He worries that he is being childish, wanting such little things. Such homely things.

A boy gone off to the guild at age nine or ten can want for these things. Not a young man of three and twenty.

Everyone has the same sheets, one pillow, and eiderdown. After putting away his clothes and undressing he curls up on the bed, foregoing sheets because of the heat.

He stares at the wall.

His books are neat on the bookshelf. There are no plants in the room which distresses him. There should always be plants in his dorm room. He likes their company. He talks to them.

What he cannot afford to do is think so he doesn’t. He recites lists of poisons, dead kings of Ankh-Morpork, mathematical formulas. There is a vestige of a water stain on the wall that has been painted over. He stares at it.

Sitting up, he puts his clothes back on, takes a book and heads up barefoot to the guild roof.

A dissolute Willis loiters by the bell-tower.

‘Thought you went back to your room,’ Downey says. ‘After DB snarked at us.’

‘Couldn’t sleep.’ Willis makes whirling motions. ‘Room was doing that when I closed by eyes.’

‘So you’re on the roof, now.’

‘Seemed reasonable at the time.’

‘Fair enough.’

Downey settles next to Willis who silently offers him a cigarillo. Downey takes it thankfully. 

‘You look like shit,’ Willis says. ‘Thought you might need one.’

‘Cheers.’

‘How’s your summer going? Tits up like a drunk cow?’

‘Yeah, something like that.’

‘Glorious.’ Willis blinks several times and looks at the ground below them. ‘Fucking stunning.’

‘Same for you?’

‘Mate, there’s a reason I’m drunk at four in the morning on a Tuesday.’ Before Downey can reply Willis reaches over and takes hold of his shoulder. With grace he proceeds to lean over and vomit off the side of the roof. He sits back with satisfaction. ‘I feel so much better now.’

‘You’re a mess, Willis.’

‘Indeed I am.’

‘Why are you drunk on a Tuesday?’

‘My girlfriend left me.’ Willis’ face scrunches up and he scrubs his eyes fiercely. ‘Left me for Thompson. You know Thompson?’

‘Blond, tall, impeccable profile?’

‘Quite right. He's a fucking cunt.'

‘Well,’ Downey says philosophically, ‘better she leave you then you be stuck in a loveless relationship where you develop deep seated resentments towards each other.’

‘I was going to propose.’

‘ _Even better_ she left you now than later.’

Willis hiccups. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Absolutely. No shame of divorce.'

‘I love her.’

‘Shit’s hard.’

‘Like, Downey, it hurts. I didn’t know it could hurt so bad. Do you know how bad this hurts?’

‘No,’ Downey lies.

‘So bad. I drank a bottle of wine and then I had some ill thought out whiskey and now I want to vomit again and just...cry forever. I hate that. That’s stupid. Why does it hurt so bad?’

‘Because the human heart is a piece of shit.’

‘It really is.’

‘And the human brain is stupid.’

‘Yes.’

‘And love is tricky. It’s sticky, too. Like, if you love someone and a situation gets hard what do you do? Like, if you’re not meant to be with them but all you want is to be with them?’

‘Gotta stick it out,’ Willis says with the wisdom of the drunk. ‘The right girl is hard to find. I thought I had with Annie. She had the prettiest laugh and she was so _cool._ ’

‘I’m sorry she left you.’

‘Yeah, me too.’ Willis turns and grabs Downey’s shoulder again. ‘Your girl, the one you’re not supposed to be with. What do you love most about her?’

Downey thinks then says, ‘freckles. Her freckles oh, and that I can’t be too much of a shit. I’m a shit. People think I don’t know that but I do. I just don’t care-’

‘Quite right, chap, fuck them.’

‘Right? Anyway, I can’t be too much of a shit.’

‘She call you on it?’

‘All the time.’

‘Gotta stick it out, my friend. Gotta find a way. It’s worth it.’

Downey thinks there might something to Willis’ drunken insistence on trying. There are a thousand things to imagine in his life if Jacob is in it. A thousand and one things if he’s trying very hard.

The difficulty is that he has to _tell_ Jacob. He does not want the other man’s pity. He does not want his sorrow or his grief on his behalf.

‘I have to go,’ Downey says. He suddenly cannot be on this rooftop smoking yet another cigarillo as Willis recites poetry. ‘I have some things I need to do.’

‘Going tell her you’re going to find a way? Good for you. Elope! That’s my advice.’

‘Thanks,’ Downey grins. ‘I’ll keep it in mind.’ Pausing at the edge where the crenulations are strong enough to support his weight Downey asks, ‘Willis. What do you think of the gods?’

‘Gods?’ Willia shrugs. The sun is beginning to rise. It catches in his blond hair. ‘I don’t think about them. I assume they don’t think about us.’

‘Right. That’s what I thought.’

Willis waves as Downey drops down to lower roofs and makes careful way back to his room.

He has to tell Jacob what happened.

He cannot imagine a more dreadful thing.

There are no gods for this.

 

/

 

Outside is as oppressive as inside. Downey sinks against the closest ally wall. He fumbles for a smoke and match box. What a mess. He is shaky as he lights up. Closing eyes he breathes out smoke.

Taking himself off he walks the city for an hour before ending up at the Patrician’s palace. Vetinari is in the Oblong office with work and is deeply unsurprised when Downey slides into the room.

‘I trust my guards are in one piece,’ Vetinari says without looking up.

‘They didn’t notice a thing.’

‘Good.’

Standing by the far wall and the dark fire grate Downey watches Vetinari work. Head bowed over paper. The only sound is pen nib scratching. Downey likes to keep a collection of images of people he likes. Scenes he can call up when he thinks of them and he catalogues this one away for Vetinari. It’s strikingly peaceful.  

‘Can I help you?’ Vetinari asks.

‘I know this isn’t how we usually do things. I can leave if you’re busy.’

‘I’m always busy, Downey.’

‘True.’ A brazen grin. ‘I guess it’s a good thing I’m handsome. Gives me leeway. But I’ll go.’

Vetinari waves a hand, ‘Don’t. You’re here now.’

Downey agrees. Yes, he is here now. He takes off his hat and coat before making them both a drink. Between these activities Vetinari moves from desk to chairs.

‘It’s good you’re here,’ Vetinari says taking the glass. ‘I wanted to discuss something with you.’

‘Ominous. Cheers.’

‘We should lay out rules and expectations for engagement.’

Downey can’t help smiling. He says that this is possibly the most Vetinari-ish sentence he has heard in a while and, since they have begun their _thing,_ he has heard a good many Vetinari-ish sentences. And has had a good many Vetinari-ish thoughts, he doesn’t add.

Vetinari continues, ‘First, we must ensure that there is no pattern to our meetings. Never the same time or day is preferable. Location, unfortunately, is limited so discretion is key. If any questions are raised you are a city official and so we can structure a cover up around pressing business, city needs and so on.’

Downey agrees. This seems reasonable. Part of him is relieved that this is the conversation they are having and part of him wants to address the parental incident. Gods, he thinks, it’s not like Vetinari is the best person for this. He doesn’t do easy intimacy. He doesn’t do easy anything. Fuck, here he is cataloguing rules for all communications. The man has a bleeding _checklist_.

‘I think we can safely sum all of this up as “don’t be fucking stupid,” don’t you?’

Vetinari purses his lips. Downey smirks.

‘City comes first in all things,’ Vetinari says with finality.

‘Yes. I know.’

‘If anything should happen, City is first.’

‘I’m aware. If there’s a knife to my throat or the city’s safety I know your choice.’

‘Good.’

Downey thinks it time for a second drink. He could use a bottle of wine at the moment but has to teach in the morning and has a contract to fill in the evening so needs to function. Vetinari takes his glass and pours them a brandy.

Already there is calm. Downey feels the drink pressed into his hand and weight of eyes on him. He doesn’t want to talk. He wants to talk. Vetinari sits with silence and patience. He is a calm lake. Downey wants to drown in him.

‘Saw my father today,’ Downey says.

Vetinari’s lips part a fraction then close. He drinks.

Downey rubs his face, ‘He’s a hard man.’

‘What did you speak about?’

‘Oh, nothing much. We don’t have much to say to each other, generally speaking.’

The brandy is considered. The room is dark save for a few candles on the patrician’s desk and one brought over that sits on a table between them. Downey finishes his drink and stands with a hand out to Vetinari who takes it.

They go from office to bedroom.

What luxury to be naked and not freezing. The sheets are pushed to the foot of the bed because it’s hot. Downey does his best to empty family from mind. They serve no purpose. They have served no purpose for thirty years. It’s a bitter thing. He had a better functioning relationship with dead Cruces than with his family.

He must focus on the now. The now of Vetinari’s terribly blue eyes and black hair which is gaining silver around the temples and his handsome profile. Downey thinks, I’ve always loved a good profile.

The now of sinking between Vetinari’s thighs. Hands on his legs, tracing the scar from the gunne. The now of breath changing as Downey’s mouth moves from inner thigh to cock. Vetinari hands become distracted. They go from sheets to Downey’s hair immediately back to sheets.

Downey rubs himself against the bed. He is hard and desperate. One hand is bracing himself, the other strokes the base of Vetinari’s cock. He wants to fuck the other man something savage and the noises being made make him think Vetinari wants it too.

Or, maybe he’s just really into getting sucked off. Downey reasons he’s happy either way.

Pulling up he kisses along Vetinari’s neck then mouth. Vetinari’s legs are still spread and gods Downey thinks this is possibly one of the more divine moments in his life. He feels hands on his back sliding down to hips then to prick.

An appreciative moan. We don’t fuck enough, he thinks. But then that would probably go against the fiddly rules of self-preservation Vetinari has laid out.

Downey isn’t sure how to frame his question so decides to barrell forward in bluntness, ‘can I fuck you? Would you be alright with that?’  

‘You don’t do subtly do you?’

‘This isn’t the time for subtly.’

Vetinari makes a face that says something like: Really, Downey? But this isn’t the time to be faux-affronted, either. Vetinari sighs, says that yes that is fine. Downey, teasing, ‘what? Only fine?’

‘Very well, yes I would be alright with that.’

‘You don’t do blatant enthusiasm do you?’

To this Vetinari huffs and pushes Downey onto his back. If the man is going to be so ridiculous then he can’t be in charge. There is only suppressed amusement. Vetinari straddles Downey’s hips. Downey smirks up at him then rolls them over then kisses him,  as it seems the correct thing to do and telling the patrician that he is attractive when annoyed is a bit patronizing. It would rankle Downey if someone did it to him so he has a kind moment and doesn’t comment.

Downey pulls them to the edge of the bed so Vetinari is lying on his stomach with feet on floor. The sheets are in disarray, Vetinari rumples them more by dragging some over to bury his face into them as Downey eases a finger into him, then another. Vetinari breathing changes. Becomes deeper. More controlled.

It’s when Downey pushes his cock in that Vetinari’s breath comes out in half a strangled moan. A foot hooks around Downey’s ankle then unhooks. Fingers dig into sheets. Downey thinks this is like a sunrise, only better.

Vetinari is tight and making burrowed moans as Downey thrusts. Downey holds onto his hips, angling them up slightly and watches himself enter. Gods, he wants to come. He thrusts harder, half bending over Vetinari who shoves a hand down to his prick. Downey takes the hint and pushes it away, wrapping his own around Vetinari’s cock and stroking.

‘Tighter,’ Vetinari hisses. Downey obliges.

He feels Vetinari tightening around him, coming over his finger. Downey pushes in thinking, oh gods, oh gods before he comes.

‘I think I’ve got a leg cramp,’ Vetinari says as Downey sinks down on top of him, kissing the back of his neck.

Downey sighs.

Vetinari twists to look at him, ‘please move. I need to stretch.’

‘I was trying to have a moment. People do that after sex you know.’

‘I appreciate that. My calf does not.’

  


Once settled back into bed, Downey flings himself over to the edge and rummages through his clothes for cigarette and matchbox.

Vetinari watches with a look then says, ‘it’s a marvel how much you can be so... _you_ sometimes.’

‘Thank you.’ Downey smiles cheerfully. ‘Want one?’

‘No, thank you.’

Downey breathes out smoke and sinks back down, eyes closed. It is difficult to parse why he came here instead of going home to a nice gin, a bath and his dogs. Alsace and Harold probably have as much insight into familial issues as Vetinari. It’s because of confidence, he thinks. Confidence in one another is important.

‘Gods,’ he sighs.

The bed shifts. Vetinari is standing, presumably. Dressing, presumably. There are the sounds of clothes being ruffled around.

‘What advice has your mother, uh aunt, given you that’s come back to haunt you?’ Downey asks between drags and ashing in the abandoned brandy glass on the side table.

‘Madame rarely gave advice that would haunt.’

‘Really?’ Downey opens his eyes. Vetinari is sitting at his desk but twisted around in the chair to watch him. ‘I’m surprised. She struck me as a woman who would dispense useful but chilling aphorisms.’

‘Are you basing this assumption on some penny dreadful-esque stereotype of sex workers?’

‘Probably.’

‘Please don’t.’

Downey is sheepish for a passing second. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Did your mother?’

‘Sort of. I was just thinking that some lessons from parents arrive years later. Usually with an aftertaste. And I was thinking that while I don’t disagree with the sentiment of what she said, I think it was wrong for her and that it’s a shame she never worked that out.’

Vetinari’s gaze is the steady, heavy one he adopts when thinking.

‘You know, she could have been happy.’ Downey continues thoughtfully. ‘Once upon a time. If she just wanted more for herself.’

Considerable silence.

A cautious ask from Vetinari, ‘Do you think she’ll be happy once your father dies?’

‘Yes. But I don’t think she’ll know it. I doubt she remembers the colour of it.’

‘Colour?’

‘Happiness is blue. Anyway,’ Downey sits up, turns to snub out the cigarette in its own ashes. ‘I should go. Long day tomorrow.’

Leaving, Downey thinks Vetinari had been on the verge of saying something but it hadn’t manifested by the time he was dressed and out the door.

 

/

 

Once home and unable to sleep Downey reads the bad Sue Lifton murder mystery novel borrowed from Vetinari. He is amused by, yet adores, the fact that Vetinari has underlined passages. That man,  he thinks, will always be a giant nerd.


	12. Chapter 12

Before he can write Jacob, Downey writes to Ludo because writing to Ludo is calming. 

He lays everything out but vaguely. He wants to frame the narrative in a flattering way, in a way that won’t beg questions. The world is cascading. It is water splashing out of a tub, running over edges of a sink. The Ankh flooding, as she does in spring. Unwieldy and murky is his mind. 

He makes a list. He likes lists. 

  1. Dear Ludo, I had an argument with my dad. 
  2. Dear Ludo, It got pretty bloody. But in that silent way Amos gets bloody. 
  3. Dear Ludo, I’m kipping at the guild so please send all correspondence here. 
  4. Dear Ludo, I guess I’m doing my PhD. Only, I costed it out last night and if I’m working while I do it, to pay for it you know, I might be at it for a very long while. I’ll be in my thirties before I’m done. And that’s if I do it straight, without stop, while also working.
  5. Dear Ludo, I’m pissed DB is going to get his letters before me. Why does that scag have so much money? How is that fair? And he’s not even aware of it. He just floats through life with his stupid money and his stupid face and his stupid ability to get whatever he wants. Gods I hate him. He’s never known difficulty. He’s never known what it is to be so fucking terrified of making a noise you walk on the edges of floorboards. He’s never known what it is to be insecure. He’s so fucking privileged and so fucking full of himself and has it so fucking easy in life. Gods. 
  6. Dear Ludo --- 
  7. Dear Ludo, I’m -- 
  8. Dear Ludo, I can’t do this. 
  9. Dear Ludo, I’m so frightened of getting this wrong.  



He strikes out six through nine. 

 

He frets. His skin itches. His room is too hot. It needs plants. He wants to drown in them. 

He decides he can’t stay in his room, he’ll go crazy if he stays in his room so he ought to go out. For something to do. If he stays he’ll probably nap and if he naps he’ll dream the dreams of other people. 

Going down the hall to leave he bumps into a deeply hungover Willis who rests, pressing his forehead against cool marble walls. 

‘You know there’s probably ice in the kitchen,’ Downey says. 

‘Probably,’ Willis agrees. 

‘I’m going to go buy plants. Want to come?’ 

Willis turns to look at Downey which means the entire left side of his face is squished against the wall. He mumbles a reply. Downey says sorry he didn’t catch that. 

‘I said uh maybe.’ 

‘Well I’m going now.’ 

‘Plants?’ 

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’ 

‘Because.’ 

With great concentration of effort Willis pushes himself off the wall and says that he will come too but only if they can stop and get coffee along the way and maybe something greasy wrapped in bread.   
  
  
  


‘Plants?’ Willis repeats once he has a coffee in hand and is shoving a fried egg sandwich in his face. ‘What?’ 

‘I need them.’ 

‘Why?’ 

‘Because. Now we’ve repeated ourselves. We’re very stupid today, Willis.’ 

‘We’re always stupid, Downey.’ 

‘I beg to differ.’ 

Across the bridge and past the Isle of Dogs and across another bridge takes them to the tree lined streets of the wealthier areas of Ankh-Morpork. Carriages have weight and more than two horses to pull them. And the horses are only  _ carriage _ horses. There are no merchants here but to serve, there are not even squires or the lower quasi-gentry of the countryside that can sometimes afford houses in the city. 

Tucked down an alley is a shop perfumed with roses, geraniums, hibiscus. The flesh of petals is luxurious. The white of lilies indelicately spotted with their swollen, yellow pollen. Their heavy buds waiting to burst. 

The smell being pungent, the heat and humidity being overwhelming, and his hangover being intense, Willis opts to wait outside with his coffee and a smoke. 

Ms Foxe, who works behind the counter, knows Downey well. She bobs a ‘good morning’ before ushering him into a backroom full of far more interesting specimens. 

‘I’m here for a mix of things,’ Downey says as he inspects a delicate mantis orchid. ‘I want some basics of spiders plants, lavender, succulents - pretty ones. Maybe a flower.’ 

‘Lavender has flowers.’ 

‘More flowers. Useful flowers.’ 

‘Dandelions? Begonia? Day lily? Lilac? Carnations?’ 

‘The first two.’ He moves from the mantis orchid to oleander. ‘And some more interesting plants. I like this one, she’s looking very healthy.’ 

‘The oleander’s sold.’ 

‘Oh?’ He frowns. The soft pink-white of petal lips tilt down, a gentle, falling frown. Not as voluptuous as orchids, rambunctious as monkshood, he thinks them dainty. Oleander is a pretty flower. A whimsical way to inhume. ‘One of our own?’ 

‘No one else buying oleander.’ 

‘I suppose.'

‘Yeah it were an assassin. Lad your age, black hair.’ 

‘Dog-botherer!’ Downey hisses under his breath. 

‘No, no he had a fancy name. Nothing crude.’ 

‘Oh,’ Downey sneers over the deadly flowers. ‘Everything about him is crude. He’s just not aware of it.’ 

Ms Foxe raises her eyebrows but does not push the subject. Downey knows he is being petulant but doesn’t care. DB is the literal worst. 

‘Fine,’ he mopes away from the oleander to another shelf of more-or-less deadly plants. An exotic green captures his eye. The grasping nature of a vine hugging wooden ladder. ‘Oh, is this Coral Bead?’ He gestures to the plant in a large pot. Aside from the colouring, it’s an uninspiring thing but nothing else on offer is of interest and he believes he needs at least one thing assassin related for the look of it. 

‘It is.’ 

‘This hasn’t been bought by that filthy pestilence named Dog-botherer?’ 

Ms Foxe shakes her head. Oh no, no he passed on that one. Downey scowls at the vine. It will have to do. 

  
  
  


Willis is not keen on helping Downey lug his new plant collection back across the city and complains as they walk. It’s hot, is Downey aware of how hot it is? It’s so muggy. How can Downey think to make them carry this fucking plant in its large, ugly pot when the air you can swim through? Downey ignores him. Instead, he contemplates all the ways he could slip crushed Coral Bead seeds into Dog-botherer’s food, never mind that it would be breaking guild rules. 

It is in the middle of the Isle of Dogs when Downey sees a shock of red hair and those constellation freckles and warm eyes - that face that can only be Jacob’s. Immediately, he is hot and cold at once. He slows down. He cannot hear Willis’ complaints. 

How like a penny dreadful, he thinks abstractly. The abstraction of his mind shuts down. 

He adjusts everything he is carrying so as to wave. Jacob sees them. His face becomes white. So pale and such a sunny day. Such a hot day. Jacob is torn between waving and not waving. 

Willis shouts, ‘oy l’Enfer! Help us carry this beastly plant.’ 

Downey thinks Jacob’s face a masterpiece. Currently, a masterpiece of pained expressions. 

‘What ho, Willis.’ Jacob approaches cautiously. ‘Nice bush.’ 

‘It’s a vine,’ Downey automatically corrects. 

Jacob isn’t looking at him. Jacob is looking at Willis. Willis is looking like he might vomit the remains of last night’s alcohol and this morning’s coffee and sandwich. 

‘Nice vine,’ Jacob says to Willis. 

‘How are you?’ Downey asks. 

‘I’m fine. How are you?’ Jacob replies now talking to the vine which is still held by Downey and Willis. 

‘Fucking hungover,’ Willis says. ‘And Downey here made me go plant shopping with him.’ 

‘I didn’t make you,’ Downey replies primly. ‘And I’m fine.’ 

‘Good,’ Jacob says with too much cheer. ‘We’re all fine. Except Willis.’ 

Jacob touches his hat and moves past them. Downey looks over his shoulder as the young man disappears into the crowd. His stomach has knotted itself twice over. He frets that something is wrong. Well, something more than what is already wrong which is basically everything. 

Downey sighs. Shifts the plant between him and Willis then nods towards the guild whose rooftop they can see rising over murky summer smog. 

‘Willis, life is trouble.’ 

Willis agrees. 

  
  
  


The hallway is as empty as it was when they left as Downey and Willis shuffle the vine towards the stairs that lead to the graduate student rooms. They pause for a rest at the base. 

‘Gods,’ Willis groans theatrically slumping against a pillar. ‘I feel like death.’ 

‘You look like death.’ 

‘Why am I doing this again?’ 

‘Because I listened to you wax poetic on a rooftop last night.’ 

‘Oh right.’ Willis scratches his hair which is sticking up. ‘You and your girlfriend going to elope? Is that what we settled on?’ 

‘Yeah that’s what we settled on. And I don’t know. Maybe.’ 

‘Do it. Fuck all this shit.’ 

‘All right, shall we?’ Downey gestures to the pot. Bags with his other plants are cutting into his arms and he wants to collapse onto his bed in a heap of despair but can’t until the plants are in their proper places. 

Footsteps descending and there comes Vetinari with an armful of books wearing an ugly, annoyed expression. Downey takes one look, growls,  ‘you bought my oleander!’ drops his bags and lunges for the other man who goes down on the stairs with a startled ‘ow.’ 

Willis, very bored, watches them fight. 

Vetinari manages a, ‘what are you talking about?’ before Downey punches him in the face. Vetinari fights back by trying to claw at Downey’s eyes but can’t get his hand at the right angle so settles for clabouring at Downey’s mouth until Downey bites him. Vetinari switches to slamming his knees into Downey’s back since Downey, being the bigger of the two, has decided his best tactic is to sit on Vetinari. Muffled snaps of, ‘get off you oaf’ as they flail at each other. 

‘Boys!’ Dr. Tindel looms over them. It’s sudden. They both separate immediately. ‘My office, now.’ 

 

/

 

It’s because of the Sue Lifton novel. The one he finished last night with the sisters and the fight on the barge and some ridiculous mystery in Genua. That is the reason Downey ends up here. He blames the novel and through the novel Vetinari. He wouldn’t have read the yellow-back if he hadn’t slept with Vetinari and he wouldn’t have slept with Vetinari if Vetinari hadn’t been so gods-damn Vetinari-ish. 

There needs to be some honesty. It creates economy for feelings. If he’s honest with himself maybe he’ll stop being so tired. Maybe his mind wouldn’t go so fast all the time. It hasn’t really stopped for breath in the last week or so. Fast fast fast and not at all productive. It’s all circles and fog. 

Maybe he’ll stop doing stupid things if he’s more honest. Doing stupid things and blaming it on novels and patricians. Stupid things like going to Rob Flint’s shop to have something or other looked at. He borrowed a sword from Mericet. Older than the old man himself and in desperate need of repair. 

The deaths are itching scabs. Mr. Carter’s more than the potential of Downey’s father’s death which he now doesn’t have to think about since he’s done his duty by the family so everyone can leave off about that. 

Gods his brain feels like fire. He had hoped the fuck would calm things down, ground him — sex being such a foundational act of humanness but it was no help. So now he’s walking into the Flimt family armoury with walls hanging in plate armour older than Mericet’s grandfather’s sword. Everything is dust and iron. 

Robert Flint is squinting at account books. In his late forties he’s a thickly built man. Strong armed with as well a developed upper body as any other smith. Brown hair peppered through with grey and nose that has seen better days. A different man from the lad Downey remembers sneaking down alleyways with Sicily. 

He shouldn’t have come here. DB’s going to have his guts for garters if he finds out Downey has been meddling in the case despite being told to bugger off. 

DB — there’s a name he hasn’t thought about in an eon. A nick-name of a nick-name. Havelock Vetinari is too much of a mouthful even now. 

He shouldn’t have come here. 

Yet, here he is. The William Downey life story. 

Flint looks up and, seeing a gentleman, straightens with speed. 

‘What can I do for you, sir?’ 

The sword is produced, laid on the counter, unwrapped. 

‘I’ve been meaning to have this mended,’ Downey explains. ‘Old family sword, you know. Belonged to an umpteenth grandfather or other. Long dead. Not much use to me but it’s not the done thing to let heirlooms go.’ 

Flint takes up the sword. Downey watches the inspection of the blade, hilt, leather work. 

‘I can’t save much of the handle. That’ll have to be redone. But I can do a fair replication if that’s what you’re after, sir. You’ll hardly know the difference. Or, you know, your grandfather would hardly know the difference from how it was in its prime.’ 

‘Sure, why not.’ 

‘Hefty thing.’ 

‘Yes.’ 

‘You had ancestors in war, sir?’ 

‘Oh, probably. I’m sure if you go back far enough we all have someone who’s fought in one battle or another. Gods know Ankh-Morpork’s had its aggressive, expansionist phase.’ 

Flint purses his lips; returning to the inspection he side-eyes Downey. That isn’t the reply of a lord. Someone who has their ancestry tattooed onto the inside of their eyelids. 

‘I’m sorry, sir, but do I know you?’ 

‘No.’ 

‘I’m certain I know your face.’ 

‘Quite possibly.’ 

‘But we’ve never met.’

‘No.’ 

‘But I know your face.’ 

‘We’re becoming dull, Mr. Flint.’ 

‘My apologies, sir.’ 

‘Anyway, dreadful news lately.’ Downey internally winces. The segue was more brutal than Carter’s death. 

‘Oh?’ 

‘That murder. Well, I assume it’s a murder. The Watch are very suspicious. More so than usual, being a nasty suspicious bunch. Do you know them?’ 

‘The Watch?’ Flint’s baffled expression begins the slow progress to wariness. ‘No, sir. Don’t much care for cops, sir. I know too many people done wrong by them over the years.’ 

Downey beams, ‘excellent. I don’t care for them either. Still, sticky business isn’t it? The death of Mr. Carter.’ 

Flint’s face flickers so minutely Downey isn’t sure if the reaction was real or if he was reading too much into it. This is clearly a man who knows how to arrange his face, a trait Downey can respect. 

‘Mr. Carter?’ Flint frowns. ‘Don’t know the man. But, if he’s dead, that’s a shame. And by violence, too. Never a good way to go. I guess he left behind a family? Little ones?’ 

‘Oh no, only a wife.’ 

‘She must be distraught.’ 

‘She must be.’ 

Flint drums the benchtop with fingers, ‘will that be all, sir? Just the sword?’ 

‘Oh yes, thank you. When will it be done?’ 

‘Week Friday, if that is amenable Mr. Uh—’ 

‘Downey. Lord Downey. Week Friday is perfect, now if you’ll excuse me, I have a widow to visit.’ 

Now Flint’s face reacts. It changes colours, the sure sign of a stomach dropping. Downey smiles, touches the brim of his hat, and ducks out of the shop.

  
  


Downey circles the block, ducking into shops to make it look like he has purpose in his loitering in such a part of the city. He’s just within view of the Flint shop looking at whalebone combs (the shop lady: These are good for young ladies. Do you have a daughter, sir? She might like this one, or oh yes, that one in your hand is nice. But this one, sir, for a lucky daughter. Maybe it’s her birthday? Maybe a special occasion? Here is a pretty ivory comb she can wear in her hair which looks fetching with the latest summer fashions. Sir? Downey is of no help). 

It’s just as the shop lady has given up attempting to sell anything to him when Rob Flint exits the family shop and scoots down an alleyway with the unmistakable look of a guilty man. Downey smirks, gives his apologies to the shop lady, a dashing smile, then follows Flint down the alley. 

A circuitous route and eventually they arrive in the neighbourhood of Sicily Carter. The man is a walking cliche, Downey thinks. This is directly from that Lifton novel. If this gets found out I’m telling Vetinari it’s his fault for having that book lying around. He can hear Vetinari’s dry comment, ‘I believe you began this ill thought out adventure before I lent you the novel.’ In his head he replies, ‘Whatever.’ 

Flint doesn’t knock on the front door, smart man. Instead he goes to a side door, raps three times very smartly and stands back as Sicily opens it wearing deep purple. Deep enough to almost be black but it isn’t. That is to say, if you are glancing, or not thinking about it, or in the right light you could be forgiven for thinking Sicily Carter is in her mourning clothes. But she isn’t. And her smile is wolfish glee when she opens the door to Flint. 

Downey is around the corner trying to listen as he catches glimpses of them reflected in a window. Flint is leaning up to her, Sicily is leaning down, it’s very intimate. He can hear something about, ‘your brother --- shop --- Carter.’ Then there’s Sicily, ‘gods --- Will (or, will) --- can’t --- find.’ 

Flint pulls away, Sicily’s hand lingers on his cheek then she closes the door gently with her perfume lingering in door-frame. Flint stands motionless, head bowed, before muttering a series of curses as he walks off. 

Downey watches with grim satisfaction. Oh yes, he thinks, I knew they were up to no good. 

He reasons that the only reason for Flint to abscond to Sicily so shortly after their conversation was to tell her that Downey was on to them. That is the most reasonable assumption. 

With levity he departs for the guild. 

  
  


/

  
  


Oh what embarrassment. Downey is beat red. Even Dog-botherer manages a blush of shame. Their hair sticks up. They’re sweating and standing as still as possible while Dr. Tindel lectures. 

‘I expect better from both you,’ Dr. Tindel continues. ‘I’ve known you both since you were nine and while I am given to understand that there is something of a rivalry between you both--’

‘One sided, I assure you,’ Vetinari says quickly. 

Dr. Tindel ignores him. 

‘I expect you to behave in a manner that befits gentlemen of this establishment. Thankfully, as it is summer, no one but poor Mr. Willis had to witness you both embarrassing yourselves in such a childish way.’ 

‘It’s DB’s fault,’ Downey is plaintive. 

Dr. Tindel ignores him, too. 

‘Now, as I have great expectations for both of you I expect you both to get yourselves sorted. You have research to do together--’

‘I can manage it on my own,’ Vetinari says. 

Downey glares at Vetinari, ‘I can as well.’ 

Dr. Tindel continues to ignore both of them. 

‘Now, since neither of you have anything useful to say for yourselves, please feel free to make yourselves absent from my office.’ 

They sulk out.   
  


 

At night it’s all about dreaming in absence. There is the missing father, the missing mother, the missing siblings. He dreams them up and makes them walk through a house and play family the way he and his sisters had done as children. This is a happy home, how do you play happiness? It’s a death, what has happened. And death only happens to the living. We, the quick, ritualize it by existing. 

He walks through the dream house and there is a dream kettle and a dream table and dream supper on it with a dream bed waiting for him upstairs where the dream door of the house keeps all the bad of the dream world at bay because bad is outside, not in. 

Twilight, early morning grey Downey wakes nauseous. He crawls from his room to the shared bathroom down the call and spends half an hour dry heaving. 

He is no longer the young man who was in love having an exacerbating, but still generally good, summer. He is no longer full of future.

He wants become quiet. The quiet cannot be hurt.  

Banging open stall door he rinses his mouth out though there is nothing to rinse. He watches the water trail down basin into drain. What wretchedness.

‘Oh.’ 

Downey looks up to see Dog-botherer in the mirror. They stare at each other through the reflection. There’s a shiner beneath Vetinari’s left eye. Downey sports scratch marks on his chin and red eyes. 

Too tired, too utterly tired for all of this. Downey brushes by without a word. 

He falls asleep as sun rises thinking please come home, please come home, please come to the garden, please drink this tea, please please please come home home home.

 

/

 


	13. chapter 13

What is there to ponder aside from his sister’s most likely murder of her husband? There are many things. There’s summer students, there’s a new term to prep for, there’s guild politics, there’s annoyed parents who continue to have opinions on Guild sexual education course, there’s annoyed parents who think their precious child couldn’t possibly have the grade they’ve earned, there’s too many gods-damned parents. 

And there’s Vetinari. 

Downey sighs. 

The issue, Downey wretchedly thinks,  is that it’s impossible to construct the process of falling in love.

He’s been into the guild books as a Fury so full of intent. Books write well only established love and broken love - but the act of it being created is tedious. It’s boring except to those involved. This is a truth he’s known all his life but is only becoming aware of it now.  

When he was a young man he spoke as a young man and thought as a young man which is to say he was a snob about the word Love and felt it should be saved for only the most sacred of moments. As an older man who is not yet old (he has seen his father, he knows age in a new way), he believes life too sudden and too fast to be snobbish about the word Love. 

 

Does Sicily  love her blacksmith? Does her blacksmith love her? He’s never been too concerned before but now he thinks on it and reasons they must love. At the very least they must love. It’s the oldest reason in the book for murdering a man. The only one older is to do it for money. 

What would happen if he loved a blacksmith instead of a Patrician? Not much, except the stakes would be different. There’d remain secretness, there’d remain quietude, there’d remain impossibility of being open about it. Sure, men don’t disappear into Watch cells anymore, but they still get beaten up in alleyways while everyone looks away.

Does he even love a Patrician? He’s at the cusp. The part that it’s impossible to write about because it’s boring to anyone not currently involved in the cusp-ness. 

He wants to see Vetinari and tell him about his progress on the case only that would annoy Vetinari because Vetinari told him, in no uncertain terms, to drop it. To leave it to the useless, bumbling Watch. If things were left to the Watch, without the careful handling Vetinari does to circumstances around the Watch, the world would end in fire and the Watch would call it justice. 

And what progress is there to report? Oh yes, he snooped on his sister and she’s still shagging her childhood beau. That means nothing and yet it means something. Again: why else murder? 

  
  


He must detach for the day so is thankful that he has a course to teach, even if it’s only an hour and a half it’s still an hour and a half where he’s not running himself ragged with everything going on. Which isn’t much but enough to be noticed. 

It’s elementary poisons for the students who didn’t make it through the year course so it’s all the kids who sat in the back not paying attention or skipped or Just Didn’t Get It. They’re young, most are twelve to thirteen. Their uniforms are wrinkled and they have yet to master the art of appearing unaffected at all times. Indeed, that is an art they won’t achieve for some time yet, if they achieve it at all. 

Ten in total and they’re slouching in the first two rows as Downey walks through the nightshade family again. They’re failing to remember the signs and symptoms of Solanum dulcamara poisoning, rare as it is. 

‘But I thought that one was good for you,’ Ms Rideau whines. ‘I’m so confused. It’s too hard, Dr. Downey. Why do we have to learn this one anyway if poisoning with it is rare?’ 

‘Correct, Ms Rideau the solanum dulcamara has historically been used as a treatment for falls, headaches, blood clots, ringworm, chronic eczema,’ he pauses as the students respond with an elongated “eww.” ‘And concussions. However, aside from its manifold uses poisonings have occurred and it is important you be able to distinguish the signs and symptoms. Can you give me one?’ 

‘Nausea.’ 

‘And another.’ 

‘Dr. Downey I gave you one!’ 

‘You gave me a symptom that is almost always universally present in signs of poisoning. Something more specific please.’ 

Ms Rideau not-so-discreetly leans so as to see the open book on the desk next to her. She makes a performance of adjusting her hair as she “thinks.” ‘Um, jaundice?’ 

‘Correct, in more extreme cases that can be present. Mr Jones, if you would be kind enough to join us for five minutes, please provide another symptom?’ 

‘Um, which uh, we’re talking uh nightshade yeah?’ 

Mr Jones’ friend, Mr Santiago, smacks him upside the head and calls him a  _ pinche pendejo _ . Downey raises eyebrows at the language and Mr Santiago has the dawning horror that his teacher understood him. He coughs and immediately dives into his text book. Downey ignores the display and clarifies the specific plant. Mr Jones verbally stumbles around for a moment before saying, ‘eczema!’ 

Ms Rideau twists around to sneer at him, ‘that’s what it cures you idiot.’ 

‘Both of you are correct. In small doses it cures, in cases of poisoning it causes irritation to the skin and eczema-like ailments. Mr Santiago, another one please.’ 

‘Irregular heartbeat and dilated pupils.’ 

‘Two in one, excellent.’ 

Mr Jones rolls his eyes at Mr Santiago who smirks. 

Downey continues down the row, ‘Ms Cohen, another if you’d be so kind.’ 

‘Vomiting and diarrhea.’ 

‘Good, Ms Faye.’ 

‘Burning throat?’ 

‘It can occur, yes.’ 

The two girls high-five. Downey continues until the symptoms list is complete.

‘Bonus question, and whoever gets it right gets a prize.’ 

Santiago wiggles in his seat, ‘what kind of prize, Dr. Downey?’ 

Faye adds, ‘and can it be something good? Bragging rights are lame.’ 

Rideau agree, ‘they’re dumb. They’re the worst prize.’ 

Downey grins and says he’ll come up with something. ‘Now, without consulting your books or notes, can any of you tell me what is the poison present in the plant, what part of the plant it comes from, and what kind of poison compound it is?’ 

Silence. 

A tentative hand up from Ms Cohen, ‘um, the flowers?’ 

‘No, but good guess as to location.’ 

Santiago’s hand shoots up, ‘the roots!’ 

‘No, but another good try.’ 

The students sit in sullen thought. Jones audibly sighs, complaining that the question is too hard. How are they supposed to know? Downey, with great cheer, says that anyone who is enterprising and hoping to make a mark of themselves in class should be able to find the answer without a problem. As he dismisses them for the day he adds that whoever can get him the answers first before their next class will get, at the very least, bragging rights. The students complain. 

‘And maybe something else, I’ll have to think about it.’ 

This raises more enthusiasm and as they exit Downey can hear Rideau bragging that she’ll be the one who figures it out first since everyone else are a bunch of stupid scags. 

He leans out the door, ‘language, Ms Rideau.’

She smiles and says, ‘of course, Dr. Downey!’ Before rolling her eyes and grabbing her friend to run as soon as the teacher isn’t looking. 

 

 

Mid-afternoon. Downey thinks: oh love, what a mess we’re in. 

He fidgets. He’s trying to update his curriculum for next term since he’s tired of teaching the same books but can’t concentrate. What if he put in experimental poetry books? 

Both the parents and the students would inhume him. 

The guild provides a  _ classical  _ education, after all. He shuffles the reading list around and takes off all the boring tripe he hates teaching. Thus far the only titles are:  _ Jane Gold; Across the Swamp Sea; Their Eyes Were Blind To The Gods; The Bloody Parlour.  _

He needs at least two more for the main syllabus then extras for the more ambitious students. He’s so tired; it’s so hot. 

What if he just napped instead? 

He adds a book,  _ The Wound Will Be The World _ . The students can deal with it. 

He fidgets some more. Alsace and Harold raise their heads with great expectation and look at him forlornly. 

‘Fine,’ he says. ‘We can go out.’ 

The dogs are excited. They bump into each other in their excitement as Downey puts on boots and finds his hat. 

Winding through streets Downey makes his way to Hide Park where the dogs can get a good run in. Alsace is off her lead in seconds and chasing after ducks (Downey asks Harold, ‘what does she think she’s going to do if she catches one? She has no hunting instincts’). Eventually, and at a slower pace, Harold follows after her. 

A good amount of time is devoted to chasing squirrels up trees then looking at Downey as if he can do something about the situation. Eventually sticks are substituted and thoroughly destroyed. By the pond, and just above the trees, the expanse of buildings, he can see the top of the Patrician’s palace. 

It’s an inevitability, he will end up there.

 

And so he does. With Alsace and Harold in tow. 

‘I didn’t have time to take them back to the guild,’ he says. 

Vetinari peers over his desk at the two panting dogs. 

‘The guild is on your way from the park,’ Vetinari says. 

‘Yes, but I’d have to go in which means I’d be detained.’ Downey smiles. ‘I thought you liked Alsace and Harold.’ 

‘I do. They are good dogs.’ 

‘They’re pleased you said that.’

‘There is just a lot of both of them. I suppose I never appreciated how large they are.’ 

Downey drags a chair over to the desk and seats himself, ignoring Vetinari’s displeased expression. He says that Harold is taller than him if he stands up on his hind legs. Vetinari looks at Harold with a serious expression. Downey clarifies, ‘he’s a lazy thing, though. He wouldn’t do it unless you ask him to.’ 

‘What are you doing here Downey?’ 

Ah, to come to it. Downey wonders what to lead with, which morning tendril of thought to unpack before them like an unwanted gift. 

‘My sister,’ he starts. 

‘Your sister.’ Vetinari repeats after some silence. 

‘Sicily.’ 

‘The one you dislike.’ 

‘Her. Yes. Anyway, I happened to see her yesterday. That is I happened to visit a blacksmith who happened to be Robert Flint who was her childhood beau and through a serendipitous set of circumstances I ended up seeing her and him and it’s very clear they’re still uh...sweethearts shall we say.’ 

‘So you tracked down Mr. Flint then followed him and he led you to your sister you know Downey, it almost sounds like you’re interfering in the case again.’ 

‘How strange.’ 

‘Even though I told you not to.’ 

‘Funny how things work out.’ 

Alsace woofs. Settles on the floor in dejection. Downey watches her then absently pets her head. He looks back to Vetinari and flashes him a winning smile. Vetinari remains unimpressed. Downey quiets himself. 

‘I believe I said I didn’t want to repeat myself.’ 

‘I didn’t steal evidence or tamper with anything. My looking up old acquaintances is my own business.’ 

Vetinari continues with an unimpressed expression. 

‘One of them is my sister. I’m allowed to visit my sister.’ 

‘Whatever you’re up to Downey, you will stop.’ 

Downey purses his lips, looks away. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, only he knows his sister killed her husband and had the gall to lamely try and implicate him so now there’s a bit of a war path. Vetinari had been explicit about city first but this isn’t a city matter, this is a family matter. 

He says as much. Vetinari doesn’t answer. Never a good sign. Downey continues, ‘Sicily and I have a bit of a past.’ 

‘You are siblings.’ 

Oh thank gods a reply. 

‘Yes, but there are siblings you have no past with. I have absolutely no past with Laure despite us being siblings. Haven’t seen her in decades. No idea where where she lives, no idea if she’s married or has children or is even still in the city. Not the foggiest. I’m not against knowing, I just never bothered to find out.’ Downey can feel himself becoming testy. How do you explain family to a man who barely has one? How complicated things are. He has to know for a fact if Sicily did it, and he has to know why she did it, and he has to know why she decided to try and frame him, and he has to know if she’s seen their dad, and he has to know why all those years ago she said the things she said and landed them both in this mess. 

Love. Family. What a mess we’re in. 

Vetinari is speaking. Tuning in Downey hears a lecture about the dispersion of power and authority with regards to police investigations and perhaps it’d be wise if Downey steered clear of everyone involved until it’s over. 

This isn’t remotely useful. He gathers up his hat and stands. Both Alsace and Harold sit back up. He says, ‘look I know you have to say all that because you’re the Patrician and you have all these discs spinning, the city being a machine and so on. I know. But that isn’t what you  _ should  _ have said. I’m annoyed, I’ll be back later in a better mood. Ta.’ He jams his hat on and strides out. 

  
  


Since this is a time for pasts and presents Vetinari allows himself a second to reflect: had we been younger that would have gone differently. 

There had been a time before Downey’s transformation into consummate gentleman, and in his way a gentle man, when that would have led to a fight. A real one. But now? Vetinari thinks it went as well as it could have. What he said needed saying. It always does. But, now that it has been said he just needs to puzzle out what it was he  _ should  _ have said. 

 

/

 

Even though they had only been seeing each other for six months Downey feels that Jacob has set up a room in every part of Downey’s head. He has restructured the architecture of his feelings so he doesn’t look at things without thinking: Jacob. 

It’s like Jacob came in and lit a fire in every grate, burned all the candles in the house, and opened all the windows then went and built one very long hallway to nothing. 

He must see Jacob. He’s walking down that hallway and he’s alone and scared. Where do you go from here? 

He talks to the coral bead because there’s no one else to talk to. Willis is drunk in a dive and Dog-botherer isn’t an option and the guild is bereft of life save a few early years summer students. 

This will change soon, with the new term upon them imminently, but until then it is him and the coral bead who he has named Francesca. 

‘I should talk to him,’ he says to the plant. ‘Plainly. I’d go to him and say, Jacob something has happened. And he’ll say, Oh? What is it? And I’ll say, My dad’s kicked me out because he knows about us and he’s disgusted. And he’d say, Gosh.’ Downey stares at Francesca. Francesca remains a silent plant. ‘Or he says nothing at all. Or he says I’m sorry. Or he says wow. Or he says that fucker. There are so many things he could say.’ 

Downey isn’t thinking about how Jacob wouldn’t look at him on the bridge. How Jacob talked to Willis and the plant but not him. What could that mean? It could mean so many things. 

_Everyone is fine. Except Willis._

Gods then there was Dog-botherer walking in on him being sick in the bathroom and that was a mortifying experience. Why must Dog-botherer always ruin everything by his unseemly existence? 

‘Am I a sissy?’ He asks Francesca. Francesca continues her existence as a silent plant. He goes to the mirror to investigate his appearance. He tries to see himself as his dad sees him. This is tremendously difficult. He doesn’t understand how his dad’s head works. But to Downey’s eye he is a young man of good height, strong build, nice face, perhaps prone to softness about the belly if he isn’t putting in effort but alas, mere mortals cannot achieve perfection. He doesn’t look like a limp-wrist, one of those poofs at the Blue Cat club. He isn’t a Molly. 

A part of his mind goes: and even if you were, what of it? 

He’s William Downey, assassin. He plans to be one of the most dangerous things walking Ankh-Morpork streets. 

People are scags. Everyone can go fuck themselves. 

Except Francesca and Ludo. 

He scrawls a note to include in his next letter to Ludo, ‘I’ve been so lonely I’ve grouped you in with the plant I talk to in my room.’ 

One of the books on his bookshelf is a small collection of experimental poetry Jacob gave him a month in. He had said, ‘I think you might like this. The style’s very you.’ 

And Downey, who dislikes most poetry, fell in love with the book. 

One poem has a part: i want to visit every dive in northern uberwald so that bigots can tell me sad things like  _ i love you your hair looks nice you have nice cheekbones  _ until someone kills me and then the creator will write my eulogy white phrases like  _ freedom is the length of a good rim job _

Another poem goes: heartbreak is an alias. It is not a name but an enactment of grief whereby one ropes strangers by the tongue into a collective wounding. 

Another: maybe he learnt love like disappearing into things that aren’t good for him. 

Another, Downey isn’t shaking looking at his dirty pencil underlines of passages, the book is shaking on its own: i paint my nails black because 1) it looks cute and 2) it is a protest. And even though i know i am too queer to be sacred anymore, i dance that broken circle dance because i am still waiting for hands that want to hold mine too.

 

He spends an hour crying. 

 

Later, Downey pours himself a drink and Francesca some water. He wonders what about the style of the book was very him? Was it the lewd language? The brazenness with which the poet is unapologetically who he is. Downey wants to take Jacob’s gentle face between his hands and explain that there is absolutely nothing brazen or unapologetic about Downey. The opposite. They are assassins, after all, everything is about performance. 

  
  


It’s early morning and the city remains humid, smoggy. Downey is ducking across rooftops towards Jacob’s house. In his hand a small little nothing, a scribbled note,  _ Please meet me _ ,  _ the gazebo roof in the garden.  _

Downey would love a garden with a gazebo. He’s only had gardens full of cabbages and turnips and drying linens. He is wretched as he waits. He is wretched when Jacob climbs up to him so handsome and sad. He is wretched as Jacob silently takes his hand and puts all the letters he had sent Jacob into it like some sort of offering. 

‘I don’t understand,’ Downey manages to say. 

‘I know what happened.’ 

‘We can still work it out, my dad’s just an asshole.’ 

‘He came to visit my father.’ 

Downey becomes still. He is sure his face resembles that of the moon - so withdrawn of colour it must be. Jacob isn’t looking at him. Jacob continues, ‘he had a letter as proof and I guess one of yours, a draft you hadn’t sent. My father has curtailed my studies. I shan’t be returning to the guild.’ 

‘But you must.’ 

‘My marriage is to be brought forward.’ 

‘You can’t let him do that.’ 

Jacob smiles, it’s a cutlass. ‘You didn’t do anything to stop your father.’ 

‘That’s different.’ 

‘Is it?’ 

‘I was given a choice that was no choice but still, I’d rather leave and do it my way than marry someone I hate and live beneath my dad’s boot.’ Downey reaches forward, takes up Jacob’s hands, they are listless. ‘Please, Jacob. We can make it. I know we can, we just have to think of something. We can run away. We’re both licensed assassins, we can go to Genua or Klatch or I don’t know, Brindisi.’ 

‘I can’t imagine it working, Will.’ 

‘Please,’ it’s a desperately breathed word. Downey cups Jacob’s face. ‘Please don’t say you can’t imagine it.’ 

‘I can’t. Look, Will, the world is the way it is. You can’t change it, and I can’t change it, and the two of us together won’t change it. We best accept life as it comes.’ 

Downey scowls, ‘this isn’t the man I remember when summer started. You said-’

‘I was an idiot. I didn’t see things clearly. I see them clearly now. I will be married, it is my duty to my family to produce an heir and maintain the title and the line. You will do whatever it is you want to do. We’ll likely not see each other much and if we do, we will be passing acquaintances.’ 

‘You can’t mean it.’ 

‘I do, and I think it’d be best for you if you learned to mean it too. Will, I did love you but that was a childish thing and it is time to grow up.’ 

Jacob is pulling away from Downey and he’s becoming glass the way Amos became glass. Downey fears that he turns everyone to glass. Like that fairy tale where the king turns those he loves to gold, softest of metals. Except it is Downey, assassin, turning those he loves to glass, most fragile of things. 

‘Childish,’ Downey’s voice is not his own. ‘This was not  _ childish _ . What you are doing is not  _ growing up _ .’ His hands are shaking, the bundle of letters creasing. Jacob has gone so far away from Downey he is at the edge of the gazebo roof about to drop down to grass and leave. Downey hurls the letter packet, it glances off Jacob’s face and falls to the ground. Downey stares at Jacob who is startled, shocked. ‘You’re a fucking coward,’ Downey hisses before turning, launching himself off to the ground and fleeing into the city..

  
  


The city is breathless. Beginning to awake it takes effort to move for the way air clings. If you sweat it does nothing to cool you for the water remains upon skin and is added to by the dampness of air. 

Downey wanders for hours. He walks and walks until he can’t see another house, another shop, another cart, another person. He wants Ludo but Ludo isn’t there. So much for having to tell Ludo anything. So much for leaving his father’s house. So much for everything. 

He walks until his feet bring him to the guild, as is their habit. He goes inside and, overheated although it is just morning, sinks to the floor once he’s in the graduate common area. 

No one is about. The marble floors are cool to touch and he rests on them until he can stand again. When he does he finds someone sitting in a chair by a window and it is who he expected it to be because his life has become a perverse mockery of itself. 

Dog-botherer doesn’t say hello, he turns a page of his book instead. Downey goes to the drinks cart and pours himself a very large brandy. He drinks it down. He pours himself a second one. 

‘That can’t be good if you’re suffering from heatstroke, Downey,’ Dog-botherer intones from behind the book. 

‘I’m not suffering from heatstroke, DB.’ 

‘I’m reading an interesting work written by a woman who never left her house she was so agoraphobic but she wrote lovely poetry.’ 

‘That’s nice.’ Downey pours himself a third. He also takes up the bottle for his own personal use as the day goes on. 

‘Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.’ 

By the door Downey says, ‘Never took you for a romantic, DB.’ 

The book is lowered and Dog-botherer looks at him with that even, unflinching gaze. ‘You look terrible. You looked terrible the other night too.’ 

‘No Ludo to listen to my woes. And parents are dratted, filthy things. Do you have dratted filthy parents, Dog-botherer?’ 

‘None that I can speak to.’ 

‘No? Well, fuck you, Dog-botherer.’ 

The world swerves, then. It sort of becomes sideways. The next thing Downey is aware of is someone holding him vaguely upright as he empties the contents of his stomach onto their boots. 

Oh, it’s Dog-botherer’s boots. 

They’re very nice, Downey thinks, good quality footwear. Nice tooling. He probably paid extra for that but the workmanship is impeccable. 

Out loud to the young man who is quite revolted at their current situation Downey says, ‘thanks.’ Pats Dog-botherer’s cheek and walks off down the hall swinging the bottle of brandy. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The three poems Downey references from the book Jacob gave him are all from Billy-Ray Belcourt's beautiful and heartbreaking and brilliant work "This Wound is a World." I only altered one slightly to fit the world. 
> 
> The poems are, in order:   
> The Creator is Trans  
> Heartbreak is a White Kid   
> I am Hoping to Help Heal this City From its Trauma   
> Sacred
> 
> If you read no other book of poetry this year, read Belcourt's.


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